At 17:27 -0400 7/17/10, Chance Reecher wrote: >> Q: what is plain >> text? and how do I make sure that I'm always using it? I thought it was >> simply in a font everybody had (helvetica) and that there was/is no >> pictures? evidently that apple is a picture? Jeff
It's getting more and more difficult to send plain text to us users of ASCII with a bit of ASCII extended. The Apple mail client will do it but it's hard to figure out how. Eudora does it well but is no longer supported Gmail really likes HTML which is the real offender. An older form of enriched text is obsolete and truly dead. Plain text allows the reader and the reader only to set his font. Attachments are OK but inserted graphics are not. On a list attachments ore usually taboo anyway. Look at the source of displayed e-mail for the Content-Type: header to see if you got it right.. For Kris Tilford it's this. Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Some would say that UTF-8 is NOT plain text. It does mean that there are no "high ASCII" characters above 127 (10) which would include the black apple. If you don't do UTF-8 with your client you'll see three funny characters which some client translated the black appl into. In UTF-8 any character above 127 is treated as a flag that says you need to include the previous two characters in a bit shifting way that yields a 16 or 24 bit extended character. format=flowed is a mechanism for sending long lines meaning greater than 80 characters. It was once useful for very slow communications mostly over telephone connections. Teletype was truly limited to 80 character buffers. Today essentially all SNTP and POP servers handle 1024 character lines which will be wrapped to window width be the receiving client. format flowed can really muck up a URL that runs over a line end. Apple mail uses a delsp=yes extension to format-flowed which is not handled by Eudora and probably other clients found on old Apples. It's a mess when URL's acquire spaces in transmission. >From Jeff we got: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed; delsp=yes Kris' second posting used this: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed; delsp=yes The ISO encoding applies to characters above 127 and that one would surely not have a dark apple in it. The dark apple probably requires an Apple font to be viewed. Chicago perhaps. JUST DON'T SEND HTML! Well, there are reasons for it but rarely, if at all, on a mailing list that's for users of older machines. -- --> A fair tax is one that you pay but I don't <-- -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
