Richmond via support-seamonkey wrote:
If someone posts the characters Left Double Quotation Mark “ or Right Double Quotation Mark ” without any mime headers to indicate the encoding, Seamonkey seems to manage to display them anyway, whereas Gnus displays \223 \224. How is Seamonkey managing to find out what these codes mean? and how can I find out what character encoding it has chosen to use?
At Edit > Preferences > Mail & Newsgroups > Text Encoding is an option "Fallback Text Encoding" with an explanation "Used for legacy content that does not declare its encoding". I haven't confirmed, but that suggests this option determines the encoding assumed in the situation you describe. For me, it's set to "Default for Current Locale"; I'm not sure whether that's picked up from the SeaMonkey UI language or the OS.
Gnus probably makes different assumptions. It might be that it assumes 7-bit ASCII and displays any bytes >127 as \xxx. Or it might be that it assumes an 8-bit encoding which happens not to define 223 and 224. Or it might be that it assumes utf-8 but, since the single bytes 223 and 224 are not valid utf-8 sequences, it displays them as \223 and \224.
Can Seamonkey change encodings in the middle of an article?
No. The whole page/email/message is in the same encoding. That's not a limitation of SeaMonkey, but defined by the protocols it uses.
For example if I use Greek Drachma Sign 𐅻 will that appear?
Only if you're using a character set which includes that character as well. If you use the Unicode character set, e.g. with the utf-8 encoding (which it appears you did for your post), you can use characters which would otherwise be in different character sets. The font used to display the message on the recipient's system has to include the characters for them to be displayed though, and few if any fonts include all defined Unicode characters.
The font I'm currently using doesn't include the Greek Drachma Sign, so all I see is a box with "01017B" in it, that being the Unicode code point for Greek Drachma Sign. Someone else might see that character as intended (as might you) it they use a font which includes it.
(In case anyone else shares my initial confusion, 01017B is indeed named "Greek Drachma Sign" in the Ancient Greek Numbers block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane; there's also 0020AF named just "Drachma Sign" in the Currency Symbols block of the Basic Multilingual Plane, which is a different character)
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