[B-Greek] writing upsilon phonetically

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Sun Apr 10 16:51:00 EDT 2005




People seem to be confusing how to produce the character on a particular
platform versus how the character is transmitted and displayed at the other
end. The fact that the Windows method of getting a character is different
from that of the Mac is quite independent of email.

If I understood correctly, Randall wasn't asking how to produce the
character on his platform (he clearly knows how to do this). I took it,
rather, that he was asking how to ensure fidelity during the transmission of
the email.

Keyboard mappings are not the same as character encoding.

Typing Alt-252 on Windows or Option-u u on a Mac both result in the same
character being included in the email, all other things being equal. If the
character displays correctly in your email software before you send it but
(some) people don't see the correct character, there are three
possibilities:

1. the sender's email software is not correctly identifying what character
encoding was used (NOTE: this is orthogonal what keys were pressed)

2. the mailing list software altered things along the way

3. the recipient's email software is not correctly interpreting the
character encoding.

I suspect that most issues with things like ü (u-umlaut) arise because email
software is assuming the wrong character encoding.

James Tauber


On 10/4/05 3:58 PM, "John McChesney-Young" <panis at pacbell.net> wrote:
> And on my Mac screen using Eudora Pro 6.0.1 the
> PC Alt-252 produces what I took at first to be a
> small comma but now suspect is an unattached
> cedilla. Herein lies yet another illustration of
> what happens when one tries to use anything but
> lower ASCII [[1]] in e-mails.






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