ANSI Format: a “doubled” modification of former ASCII
ANSI Format was developed by The American National Standards Institute and presents itself as a Microsoft-related standard for character set encoding. Also ANSI Format serves as a modified ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set. If we compare the ASCII code and the ANSI Format, the first one employs 7 bits to represent each character. At the same time, the ANSI Format utilizes 8 bits for each character.
History of ANSI Format
After the 8th bit was added to the ANSI format, many establishments including government faced the problem of unreadable documents. Different bodies had to deal with this problem, but it took some time. At first, there were misunderstandings and parties exchanged documents that were unreadable due to the different formats used. So the main issue was how to make use of the additional 128 places for characters since the changes were made and encoding was different. The solution was to create IBM (OEM) and Microsoft (ANSI) systems. These systems defined code pages consisting of ASCII for the bottom 127 characters and a given language variation for the top 128 characters.
Can we convert text to ANSI and how?
Common documents (text files) consist of characters defined in the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) set. So, the ASCII standard set has 128 characters. Also it includes letters as well as symbols (exclamation marks, commas etc.). Sometimes text documents may contain non-ASCII symbols. In order to display a text document properly, the ANSI encodes an extended set of symbols. There are some instruments to convert files like Notepad application or a default editor in Windows. Using these tools you can convert text into the ANSI format.
Today computer and communication devices become more and more complicated. The global task is to make them able to handle not only numbers. 7-bit ASCII format was the initial solution as 8-bit ANSI format was the double response to this need.
Learn more about EDI Standards and electronic communication at our webinars.