On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 01:53:14AM +0100, David Woodfall wrote: > When I view some emails I find ' replaced by qestion marks, but only some > - some emails show correctly. I've tried using various ansi/non-ansi fonts > but I can't seem to correct this. Is this perhaps due to the mailers > setup rather than mine? Yeah, though I'd be hard-pressed to explain exactly what's going on here. But let's take a look at this post from Kurt Lieber, where he quotes Kyle Wheeler: On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 12:16:45PM +0000, Kurt Lieber wrote: > On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 12:13:10PM -0400 or thereabouts, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > > >I have a macro that I use for spam reporting: > > > > > ><display-toggle-weed><forward-message>_my_address_@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<return><return> > > > <display-toggle-weed> is, surprisingly enough, a toggle. To undo it?s > > effects, just do it again, like so: The original post from Kyle is encoded in the brain-damaged cp1252, an encoding which (AFAIK) is Windows-centric, perhaps even Windows-specific, though iconv clearly knows about it on my system... Kyle's original message contains a non-ASCII single quote in the contraction "it's", which is displayed properly on my system. Kurt's response is encoded in iso-8859-1, which either does not contain that particular character (which I think is true, though I'm definitely no expert and very unsure about that), or at least the conversion from cp1252 was not done correctly on Kurt's system. Most likely the character was not present in the target encoding (it's a non-printable control code in iso-8859-1), and Kurt's system just copied the character verbatim, producing a non-printable character in that encoding, which mutt displays with a '?' character. Not particularly worthy of note is that this particular apostrophe shouldn't be here at all... it's a grammatical mistake. The contraction "it's" is a contraction for "it is", whereas Kyle clearly meant "its", the possessive pronoun (or adjective, whatever linguists have decided to call it today). I mention it despite its lack of noteworthiness because I was an English teacher and prone to pedantry anyway, and I can't help myself... ;-) It's a common mistake, and it's a pet peeve of mine. One could easily claim such a mistake to be a type-o, but analysis of the author's other writing samples usually reveals otherwise (i.e. it is made with far too great a frequency to genuinely be a type-o)... But I digress. It's hard to really pinpoint the blame for this encoding problem. One could say it is Kyle's mail configuration for using a non-standard encoding in his post, though it isn't likely something he did intentionally, and probably not really his fault. One could also say it is Kurt's configuration which is not properly converting the quoted character set properly. One could just as easily (and perhaps more satisfaction-inducingly) blame Microsoft for purveying such non-standard crap in the first place. If my understanding is correct, cp1252 has since been "accepted" as a standard, largely on account of so many broken systems using it I think, and renamed Windows-1252 (the IANA accepted name). Sigh. This web page doesn't quite give all the sordid details, but covers a lot of the salient points: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP1252 -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers.
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