Amos wrote: > for some reason, when sending a mail to outlook > sometimes result with good characters (even when hebrew) > and on some computers, the msg is gibberish (seems like utf8 that the > outlook does not recorgnize)
Once again, this is (most likely) not caused by Synapse, but since most of us at some point or another are faced with this (or similar) dilemma, I'll send my response here for the record. The description "gibberish" doesn't really tell what the received message looks like; the possibilities range from incorrect decoding that might include anything from latin letters to undecipherable glyphs. Most likely is however that some, if not all, characters in a unknown script are displayed as replacement characters; usually either "square boxes", "question marks" or something similar. This is most often caused by missing font or client application that is unable to search for suitable glyphs from other fonts when the used font does not offer all the glyphs that are required. Because of this, it's best to recommend to the end users that they use something like "Arial Unicode", "Bitstream Cyberbit", "Code2000" or something similar which all offer a tremendous subset of Unicode. Unfortunately, Bitstream Cyberbit is a commercial font, so it's very much possible the end user doesn't have it installed. Code2000 is freely available, and has the largest amount of glyphs I've seen up to date, but unfortunately, for my eyes, it's ugly :) Arial Unicode is usually the best selection (note that I'm talking about Microsoft Windows-environments) but ... an early version of the font was first released with Microsoft Office 2000 (at least, that's how I recall, I could be mistaken). Users of earlier versions usually don't have the font. However, most Windows users do have Lucida Sans Unicode (which has been part of OS installations since Win NT 3.1?). It doesn't have as many characters as Arial Unicode, but still offers latin, greek, cyrillic and hebrew glyphs, which - normally - is more than enough for most people. Furthermore, many people like to read their emails using "typewriter" fonts. Those people are usually out of luck, since I don't know a single monowidth font that offers anywhere near the glyph count as the above mentioned fonts do - and none of them are monowidth. There are other, very rare reasons, why a (working) client would mess up messages, but the lack of installed font (or a font selected to use) is the most common problem. Unfortunately for us, the sender has no way of influencing the receiver on what font s/he might be using - other than helping them choose a suitable one once they complain about gibberish :) -- Markku Uttula ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ synalist-public mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/synalist-public
