On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 08:27:30PM -0400, cga2000 wrote:
> Thus spake Kyle Wheeler on Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 10:58:56AM -0400 or
> thereabouts: <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2006-04-30 14:51]:
Since we're discussing how e-mail looks, our attribution is one
horribly long and contains a great deal of possibly redundant or
confusing date and time info... It would be good Netiquette to trim
this down a bit...
> > Unless I???m misunderstanding you, it doesn???t sound like it???s
>
> <OT>
> any idea why the quotes/apostrophes (') in the above "I'm".. "doesn't"..
> "it's" each come out as three question marks in my mutt setup - ie. "I'm"
> materializes as "I" + "???" + "m" - are you using some peculiar
> encoding or is something broken my end?
> </OT>
Kyle is, for some unfathomable reason, rather predisposed to use
"curly quotes" -- much to the detriment of most people who are not
reading mail on a Windows system with the Windows-specific cp1232
character encoding, or using a UTF-8 locale with a fairly complete
universal font. [How does one even generate these characters on a
Unix system, aside from copy-pasting them from some other source?]
Even better, some Windows applications use this encoding and
incorrectly label the resulting data as iso-8859-1. Extremely
annoying.
Many, if not most encodings simply don't contain these characters, and
so mutt can (normally) only display them as question marks. From a
typesetting-aesthetics perspective, they're kind of neat if your
system configuration happens to support them, but completely
unintelligible otherwise. Usually you can guess what they are from
context, but sometimes they just confuse things, especially if English
is not your native language...
This has been discussed fairly recently, and there is a configuration
setting which will make mutt cope with these characters... but it
would be far nicer if people would just not use these largely
unavailable and extremely annoying characters in their e-mail. As I'm
using a UTF-8 locale with suitable fonts, I can see them... so I don't
remember the configuration option, but no doubt someone will repeat
and/or point you to it. But these characters have previously annoyed
me in mail and other contexts (like web pages) for a very long time...
Sigh.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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