German "umlauts" in passphrase

[vedaal at hush.com]

Werner Koch wk at gnupg.org wrote on
Tue Jul 18 12:18:45 CEST 2006 

>On Mon, 17 Jul 2006 12:27, Karl Kashofer said:

> So, how would I examine the charset talbles ? The UserID and 
other >information printed by GnuPG is correctly displayed with all 
the >umlauts. How do I find out what character I have to type to 
get the >umlaut in my passphrase?

here is a table of the extended ASCII chart including umlauted 
letters:

The extended ASCII chart
http://www.cdrummond.qc.ca/cegep/informat/Professeurs/Alain/files/as
cii.htm

and here is an online javascript converter,
where you type whatever key you have on whatever platform,
and it will give you the ascii number of the character that is 
typed:
http://www.vortex.prodigynet.co.uk/misc/ascii_conv.html


] You need to try.  There is no conversion inside gpg and gpg uses
]whatever you type/feed.  I see that this is a problem between
]different platforms.  However there is no real solution for this
]problem because it would break all non-ASCII pasphrases currently 
in
]use.

is there a way to link the character to the underlying ASCII 
representation, so that the same character is identified cross-
platform
(for the latin alphabet at least) ?

example:  u-umlaut == ascii 129

if gnupg identified it as ascii 129,
and all platforms expect to see ascii 129 as the correct character,
then all that remains is to enter it as the same character on each 
platform

a possible way to do this,
might be to have an option for gnupg to enter the ascii number for 
each character of the passphrase, and type the number ( 0 - 256 
)instead of typing the character

not 'easier',
but at least a 'backup' way to decrypt when one cannot enter the 
exact character with certainty directly from the keyboard


vedaal









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