[B-Greek] Re- Change of prefered Language

Brent Hudson abrenthudson at yahoo.ca
Mon Nov 22 12:26:31 EST 2004


I received Raymond's Greek in Plain Text mode in Outlook.  Plain text vs. HTML is not the problem, what is the problem is the email software and whether it supports UTF-8 encoding.  If not, you get the question marks and if it does, you get Greek.  In the past, only HTML email supported UTF-8 encoding, but it has always been a UTF-8 encoding issue.  Here are my observations of what is needed for Unicode Polytonic Greek to display properly in plain text mode.  

1) Unicode fonts that support polytonic Greek (Gentium, Arial UnicodeMS, Tahoma (new version))

2) An Operating system that is Unicode compliant (Mac OS 8 and greater; Windows NT, 2000, XP - some versions of Windows that are not Unicode enabled have various kludges available to make them work (e.g., Win98, WinME))

3) An email program and mail server that support UTF-8 encoding (outlook, outlook express both support it on the Windows platform and most mailserv programs support UTF-8); 

4) A user who can remember to enable UTF-8 encoding on every message sent with Unicode information.
 
Since Wieland is using Outlook XP (which supports UTF-8), it would seem that his mailserver (slater.chemie.uni-bremen.de) has converted the B-Greek UTF-8 encoding to 7bit ASCII before delivering it to his account.  I think this highlights the problem that despite personally having all the components needed to receive plain text Unicode, some people have internet providers that either does not support UTF-8 or have configured their mailserver to reencode UTF-8 to 7bit ASCII before passing it on to the user.  I think we are stuck with the B-Greek transliteration until users start complaining to their ISP or CS departments to support UTF-8 (sadly, some Net Administrators won't know what you are talking about).

Brent Hudson
Moncton, Canada




-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of fwgk5942 at mb.infoweb.ne.jp
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 10:48 AM
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [B-Greek] Re- Change of prefered Language

> I wonder if there is a happy solution that can accommodate all sides.  
> Could we allow those who have the capability of entering Unicode to do 
> so, while those who can't, due to older technology or whatever, 
> continue to use transliteration to represent their Greek text?

Allow me to go ahead and see if this works.

This is in English.
ὁυτος εστιν ἑλληνικῶς.

Back to English...

Kind Regards,

Raymond Regalado
Tokyo, Japan
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B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek B-Greek mailing list B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek

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