On 10/18/06 10:15 AM, "Remo Del Bello" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 10/17/06 9:15 PM, Paul Berkowitz deftly typed out: > >> The reason why you see your own curly quotes perverted when the recipient >> responds again to you is because his email client incorrectly claims that >> the curly quotes you used first time (which the recipient sees correctly >> since they've been encoded as 8859-1) are part of a US-ASCII character set. >> The other guy's email client (your original recipient) wrongly sees the >> curly quotes as US-ASCII instead of 8859-1. They're not - and since they >> have a different character representation in MacRoman on the Mac, YOU see >> them perverted. But he saw them correctly, since Entourage did it right >> first time. > > I don't think the problem is when the Windows recipient receives the message > the first time. It usually is when Entourage receives the reply or when it > replies to their reply. The original, quoted message, will no longer have > the correct character representation for the curly quotes. That's what I said. The problem occurs when the Windows recipient SENDS a subsequent reply quoting the Mac quotes. Some clients on Windows perversely ignore the explicit character set declared by the Entourage message they're replying to, and perversely pretend that curly quotes are in the US-ASCII character set when they're not. Even the new sent reply message will still look OK on the Windows computer but will not look OK when received again back on the Mac. There's nothing much you can do about it at the Entourage end aside from desisting from sending curly quotes in the first place. There are two ways of doing that: either send plain text messages using plain quotes, or, if you do use HTML, go to Tools/AutoCorrect/AutoFormat and turn OFF "Replace straight quotes with smart quotes". Then, as long as you type straight quotes in the usual way, they will remain straight quotes, which are US-ASCII characters and will remain unperverted when going back and forth to Windows. > > The problem stems, AFAIK, from the fact that the ISO 8859-1 Latin 1 > character set does not officially contain curly or "smart" quotes. Windows > and Macintosh handle it differently, by using different codes for these > quote marks. Entourage, by default, uses what it calls "Western European > (ISO)" encoding, whereas Windows email clients generally use what Entourage > calls "Western European (Windows)". Unfortunately in the message's MIME-part > specification, there isn't a way to distinguish between the two variations. > So the curly quotes are encoded as "=B3" and "=B2" by Entourage whereas > Windows mail clients use "=93" and "=94". Not quite right. It would be fine if the Windows computer actually sent back 8859-1, which can happen if there are any other non-ASCII characters included in the message (e.g. ü or ß or é). But it doesn't acknowledge that curly quotes are non-ASCII, so when it sends its own reply it sends as US-ASCII if there are no other non-ASCII characters. _That's_ when you get the divergent Quoted-Printable encodings for HTML messages. > > One way to overcome these variations in the character sets is to use > Unicode, but then not every email client supports Unicode yet. > Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to default Entourage to "Western > European (Windows)", so I think you're stuck manually changing the character > set. It could be done, sort of, by AppleScript but you wouldn't know when to do it. Most email clients are Unicode-capable now, including the ones that don't know about curly quotes not being ASCII. But I think they will still reply in US-ASCII when they don't detect any characters in their new replies that actually require Unicode, in the same way that they reply as US-ASCII even when the original to which they are replying was clearly sent in 8859-1. That's the problem. Unicode sent from Entourage won't help unless you actually type some Unicode-required characters. (And you could instead just type a "ü" to force 8859-1 in the reply.) > > This is one of the reasons I use plain text... ;-) Yes, that works. As I said above, the alternative if you use HTML is to turn off automatic curly quotes. -- Paul Berkowitz -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
