An encoding or encoding scheme is a set of rules which assign a given character to a number. Internally, computers process these numbers, not characters. Therefore, for communication between two people to work when using computers, the character encoding has to be the same or what one user inputs will come out garbled at the other end.
ASCII
The only universally understood encoding is 7-Bit ASCII (which forms the basis of HTML and the Internet, for example). This encoding scheme comprises the English alphabet, the numbers from 0 to 9, punctuation, brackets etc. 2^7 = 128.
8-Bit Code Pages
For 8-bit (2^8 = 256) or extended characters sets, every platform (DOS, Windows, Mac) uses its own encoding, and no common standard exists, although efforts have been made to define such standards (ISO).
MacCampus supports the following code pages (though not all fonts are available in every code page):
Macintosh: Mac Roman, Mac Central European (CE), Mac Cyrillic (CY), Mac Romanian (RO), Mac Turkish (TU), Mac Icelandic (IC), Mac Irish/Welsh (PQ), Mac Greek
Windows: Win Standard (CP 1252), Win Cyrillic (CP 1251), Win Central European (CP 1250), Win Baltic (CP 1257), Win Turkish (CP 1254), Win Greek (CP 1253)
Other: KOI8 Cyrillic, SUAlt Cyrillic
Unicode
An encoding scheme called Unicode has been defined which will, in principle, assign every existing character to a a unique character code. Unicde is a 16-bit encoding (2^16 = 65536) with room enough for most characters of the world's languages.
Please see these pages for Unicode blocks: Unicode Latin, Unicode Greek, Unicode Cyrillic, Unicode Phonetics
