[Sca-cooks] OT: ASCII characters (was Hispanic cookie question)

[James Prescott]

At 08:55 -0500 2004-12-23, Robin Carroll-Mann wrote:

>  Nope.  I sent the original message, and I didn't copy and paste.  I 
> typed the ASCII code (alt-164), which is why I was surprised that 
> it didn't come through clearly.


There is no reliable way of including any except the basic ASCII
characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, some punctuation) in a simple text
message so that the recipient always sees what you intended.
Computer software and character sets are too non-standard.


Technical comments:

The simplest reliable way to allow most people speaking almost
any language that uses a modified Latin alphabet to see what you
mean is to send a message as HTML with the correct character
entities.  So the letter n with a tilde is written in the HTML
source with an ampersand and a semi-colon as:  ñ

Caveats:

This doesn't work if the list server doesn't allow HTML messages,
or if the recipient's email reader doesn't handle HTML messages,
or if the recipient's computer doesn't have the character in the
font(s) used to display the message, or if the character is from
a language not supported by standard HTML character entities.

A lot of people don't like to receive email as HTML (it bulks up
the size of messages, can complicate replying, and in certain
cases creates security or privacy loopholes).

Why it's a problem for sca-cooks:

We often quote recipes from other European languages, languages
which contain accented or other "non-standard" characters.

What to do:

If creating an HTML message, ensure that your text editor or word
processor options or preferences are set to create standard
"character entities".

A related to do:

If using Word or other Microsoft products turn off the default
option or preference for translation of fractions into Microsoft-
specific characters.  If you don't do this, and type the fraction
1/2, it gets changed into a single glyph that looks very nice on
a Microsoft machine but not anywhere else.  For example, on my
computer it usually looks like the Greek letter pi or sometimes
the underscore (which makes reading recipes that call for 1/2
teaspoon of something rather hard to follow).

Summary:

Computers are still complicated.


Thorvald