[ILUG] kmail and character sets

[Brian Foster]

  | Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 16:50:32 +0100
  | From: Seán Mac Suibhne (Lists) <seanmac2004 at eircom.net>
  | 
  | I wonder is there a univeraly accepted character set for all email so that all
  | mail reader programmes can read equally well?

 Yes & no (pedantically no, but in practice, for this
 audience, possibly yes).

  | Would this be ISO-8859-15?

 NO.  None of the CJK scripts, or Greek, or Cyrillic,
 or indeed most of the world's scripts (languages),
 are encodable in ISO-8859-15.   you have to use a
 full UCS encoding, and in practice, that means UTF-8.

  | It seems that Eudora and webmail readers like Yahoo and webmail.u.tv do not
  | like UTF-8 and I have not been able to send the Euro sign in ISO-8859-1

 ( I know nothing about Eudora or Yahoo: _if_ they cannot
  handle UTF-8, they are *broken*!  SO DO NOT USE THEM! )
 the Euro sign (€) is not  one of the UCS characters
 encodable in ISO-8859-1, so of course it does not work.

  | however I can send all the accented characters in Irish and the Euro sign in
  | ISO-8859-15

 Yes.  you _should_ be able to sent most(? all?) Latin
 scripts in ISO-8859-15, but that still excludes most
 of the world's languages, plus non-language symbols
 such as mathematics (∑, ∩, ∃, ∫, &tc), boxes (┏━┓┣┫ &tc),
 and indeed most of the c.50,000 characters or so defined
 in the UCS (née Unicode):  ISO-8859-15 encodes only 256
 of them (not all printable).

  | Basicly I want to send áéíóú ÁÉÍÓÚ and € in emails without them coming out
  | like the one the this link:
  | 
  | http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eolas-ibi/message/704

 _if_ you view that page forcing a character encoding
 of “UTF-8”, it looks fine.  the problem _seems_ to be
 that no character encoding (or charset) is specified
 by the HTML(/CSS), and so if (e.g.) yer browser is set
 to default to ISO-8859-(1 or 15) you see garbage, such
 as « Déardaoin » instead of the (presumably correct)
 « Déardaoin ».    so complain to Yahoo?

 here's a hint:  whenever you see strange nonsense
 which renders as Ã... (or similar), try decoding
 as UTF-8.  for reasons left as an exercise to the
 reader, non–US-ASCII Latin characters in either
 ISO-8859-(1 or 15) tend to render similar to that.

  | GRMA
  | Seán

cheers!
	-blf-
-- 
Experienced (20+ yrs) kernel/software Eng: | Brian Foster   Montpellier,
 • Unix, embedded, &tc;  • Linux;  • doc;  | blf at utvinternet.ie   FRANCE
 • IDL, automated testing, process, &tc.   |  Stop E$$o (ExxonMobile)!
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