[Techtalk] umlauts

[Alvin Goats]

> Mail systems seem to strip away characters they don't
> understand... Here's a list of UTF-8 stuff: `áºfâ,¬á»¹á¸§' (w acute, euro
> sign, y tilde and h umlaut).  I wonder if any of those get past the
> mail servers (my local sendmail seems to pass them to local accounts)?
> If they do non-destructive autoconversion, this mail should be
> encodable in at least UTF-8, UTF-16, JIS2022-7 and iso-10646, but NOT
> in any of the iso-8859-x encodings.



You may be suffering from systems that use 7 bit encoding instead of 8
bit. CompuServe has 2 different systems, the ones with "compuserve.com"
use an older system that is 7 bit based, while those with "csi.com" use
the newer 8 bit encoding. 

Lots of people assume everyone is using 8 bit encoding, after all,
that's modern and up to date. What everyone misses is that the vast
majority of systems is actually older, legacy gear that is still 7 bit
encoded. 

Take a look at all the fuss on usenet with uuencode and yenc. It's
basically the same issue. UUencode is 7 bit ASCII, yenc is 8 bit ASCII. 


As for fonts,.... the fonts vary quite a bit still from platform to
platform. We can all try to standardize, but... someone always seems to
have a "better idea". Microsoft's fonts and fonts of the same name with
Macintosh or Linux are NOT the same when the extended characters came in
(and sometimes with the rest of the characters). You also have to ask
how old the font is that the person is using on their machine. I have
some fonts that I've had since the mid-late 1980's. I have a font disk
with 2,000 fonts in Adobe postscript and TrueType (circa 1993), which I
do use with Linux. These may not be compatable with the ones you are
using today. 

And worse, if you are having the 7bit/8bit issue as well as the font
issue, the mail can really screw things up! 

Alvin