Re: OT: Re: Why do people in the UK put a u in the word color?
On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 05:16:58PM +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote:
> Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org> wrote:
>
> > If you are using a graphical display, then UTF provides a good way to
> > avoid the problem if your mail reading software can do the translation.
> > But I don't think you can assume everyone on a public mailing list is
> > going to have that.
> >
> > Regards,
> > DigbyT
>
> What do you need a graphical display for? If everything is properly set
> up, special characters will display just fine in text mode. For a few
> weeks I read mail using mutt, including -l10n-romanian, where special
> characters are used on regular basis and sometimes are a must. No
> problem reading that.
Ok, 'graphical display' probably wasn't the best way to describe what I
meant. I was trying to distinguish between displays capable of running
a graphical environment like workstation consoles and X-Terminals from
hardware such as the VT420s I often have to use at a customers site,
or PDA's I use to read e-mail when travelling.
The point is that a graphical application generally has some ability
to control fonts, whereas a text mode application has to live with
what it is given. If it has UTF components installed or is using a
compatible character encoding, then it can do the necessary translating
to make things display properly. If the character set is KOI8 and the
message uses the non-ascii parts of ISO-Latin-1, it can show question
marks or maybe a hex expansion, but it can't display the right character
so the message will be hard to read.
Sure, the world would be a better place if everyone on the net was running
an operating system like Plan9 that has always fully supported UTF
character encodings, and good for you if you have your system setup
to correctly display someones name if they write it in Hangul, but
I'll bet that if you send email with non-ascii characters in it, there
will be a significant number of people that won't see what you intend
them to.
Regards,
äÉÇÂÉ.
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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