From: steve harley
On 2011-07-22 10:46 , John Sessoms wrote:
> I've noticed that some characters in some names are represented as '?' when I
> receive list emails. I've tried changing my options to display international
> characters, but it's not working.
>
> Anyone have hints how I might do this?
the answer depends on your email client (or browser, for webmail), your OS and
what fonts you have installed ...
Email client is Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.11 on Windoze XP.
I'm guessing "what fonts you have installed" means whether or not the
fonts on my system include the extended characters I'm not seeing.
Looking at my fonts using Windows Character Map, the characters are there.
> Or is the list server somehow stripping them out?
the listserv is handling the emails correctly -- passing along the encoding of
the original email, which varies according to the sender; without specifics,
it's hard to know specifically what's bollixing for your, but a quick sample
shows the following encodings in emails on this list:
us-ascii -- (the majority) used in your email and surprisingly used by most of
the non-US members; this encoding lacks any accented characters or
"non-typewriter" punctuation (such as curly quotes)
utf-8 -- used in my email and a few others, huge character set
iso-8859-1 -- ASCII variant with a lot of Latin accented characters
windows-1252 -- superset of iso-8859-1 with more Latin accented characters
if an email is sent with the proper encoding, and your system properly
interprets that encoding and uses fonts with glyphs that cover all the
characters used in the email, then you should never see the '?' indications;
otoh, an email may be sent in an encoding which doesn't cover some characters
in the email, yet some systems may be "smart" enough to still display the
intended glyphs; for example the modern recommendation when receiving
iso-8859-1 is to assume it is windows-1252
Tools>Options>Display: Default font is Arial
Advanced options: Fonts for: Western
Proportional: Sans Serif
Serif: Times New Roman
Sans-serif: Arial
Monospace: Courier New
Font Control: Allow messages to use other fonts & Use fixed width font
for plain text messages both checked.
Character Encodings:
Outgoing Mail: Western (ISO-8859-1)
Incoming Mail: Unicode (UTF-16)
I already tried UTF-8, but I still get the '?' in place of European
characters, so I thought I'd try UTF-16 to get the larger character set.
It's still giving me the '?'.
I'll switch incoming mail to Windows-1252 and see if that will work.
What I'm NOT seeing are characters like the slashed capital 'O' in
Scandinavian names & whatever character was in the middle of the
discussion of variants of McAllister that came out "M??r".
None of this is any world shaking problem, but I would like to fix it.
It's actually the little things that irritate me the most.
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