All,
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I had some time to kill on a commercial flight earlier today, so put this
together with the hope that it might be helpful. Sorry for the length, but
I tried to keep it as non-technical as I could. That made the explanation
longer, but perhaps more understandable to the masses.
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I spent a number of years in the font industry dealing with both technical
and artistic issues so this issue of displaying special characters is an
issue that I'm somewhat familiar with. I don't consider myself an expert by
any means especially since I know engineers who have spent their entire
careers dealing with these display and compatibility issues, so please don't
jump on my comments below as being too simplistic.
Before I start my explanation, I should mention that some of you may
recognize this as a MIME error. You can easily spot MIME display problems
anytime you see an "=" (equals sign) that seems to be out of place.
Sometimes you will see this "=" sign as part of a string such as "=A3" which
is discussed below, or you may see at the end of each line. You are also
likely viewing a MIME problem when the entire page is gibberish.
Let's skip the history of the internet, its use of the 7-bit US ASCII
character set with 128 characters, and the later development of numerous
technologies that support extended character sets. (extended character sets
can contain tens of thousands of unique characters in addition to the 128
characters supported by US ASCII). I should mention too that the internet
can only transport those 128 unique US ASCII characters, and that anything
and everything other than those 128 characters must first be encoded by your
e-mail or browser software into combinations or codes made up of those 128
characters before it can be transmitted.
The scenario: You type an e-mail and you include the UK Pound symbol.
Unbeknownst to you, YOUR e-mail software will convert this to the code "=A3"
before it is sent. Your software does this since it knows that the internet
can't transport special symbols or characters unless they are first
converted to character codes made up of the 128 permissible US ASCII
characters. As the sender of this message, your e-mail software is also
smart enough to know that it needs to make a comment in the HEADER so that
the RECEPIENT'S software is informed that the message BODY contains codes
that need to be decoded in the manner specified. (Think of the header as an
envelope wrapped around the message body). Under normal circumstances when
you transmit this message directly to another person, the RECEPIENT'S e-mail
software will look at the HEADER to learn what decoding method, if any, was
used before it opens the message-BODY and swaps out the "=A3" for the Pound
symbol which it will display. Realize that after this e-mail left your
computer headed for the internet, neither the BODY nor the HEADER of your
message ever actually contained the Pound symbol (which means there is no
Pound symbol that could have been stripped out.) Realize also that the BODY
of your message does not contain any clue that the "=A3" is a code that
needs to be decoded before it is displayed, and without that clue, it will
be displayed as just plain old ASCII text. The clue that the message text
actually contains codes that need to be decoded is in the HEADER, not the
message BODY and that is the problem.
The Problem: The display problem arises because like most legacy (older
but well established) news-lists, the software used by our Europa-List host
(Matronics) strips off much of the HEADER information along with all
attachments and formatting information. It does this for a number of good
reasons relating to document size, archive size, size of list digests,
search engine speed, and virus elimination. After all that filtering and
reformatting is accomplished on your e-mail, the "sanitized" version of the
e-mail is forwarded to the list-subscribers and stored in the archives. But
because the HEADER information that would inform the RECEPIENT'S e-mail
software about the need to decode is no longer present, the RECEPIENT'S
software just simply displays the "=A3" contained in the message body as
plain ASCII text.
I hope that long-winded explanation made sense. Unfortunately, I've
addressed only a couple of MIME issues. People who have MIME issues more
severe than the occasional display of a few codes and equal signs are facing
issues that can arise from your choice of computing platform, operating
systems, and encoding options.
By the way, I'm not aware of any way in MS Outlook to eliminate the sending
of special characters. I tried "plain text" but that did not trap symbols
entered from the keyboard. Perhaps fooling around with the international
options may work, but maybe it would be easier just to remember not to use
them. I imagine there is no easy fix that can be made to the list-server
software either, and perhaps that explains why so many discussion groups,
especially the newer ones are web-based HTML rather than e-mail based ASCII
text.
Regards,
Bruce
XS142 - Berube Conventional Gear
Tracy, CA
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