[Sca-cooks] Accents and other punctuations

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Suey <lordhunt at gmail.com>
Johnna wrote:
> > Sorry about that but the copy I sent and the archives copy is correct. 
> > . . 
> > It was certainly sent as "Luis Mel?ndez (1715?1780)"
> > with the proper accents.
>
> No sorries, as you can see whether you or I send things with proper 
> punctuation certain keys turn into question marks for me when receiving 
> from SCA.

It has nothing to do with "from SCA". Accents are considered "special characters" in the world of computers. Different e-mail systems handle them different ways - and different computers (the one's sitting on our desks, tables, laps, etc.) also handle them different ways.

Since they are not standard in English, systems based in English speaking countries tend to not reproduce them correctly.

The same goes for other special characters - such as 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, and 3/4. If one is using MicroSoft products, unless you change your settings, the program will replace the three characters that make up any of these fractions with a special single character. These also do not transmit well in e-mail. I know because people post recipes to this list and i get them with the fractions replaces with Greek letters (upper and lower case Omega and upper and lower case Pi).

So, sadly, it's best in e-mail to avoid special characters. The special characters in French or Spanish are not the same as those in German or Czech or Hungarian and they'll get garbled across systems.

Here's one way SCA heralds deal with special characters in e-mail:
http://heralds.westkingdom.org/Awards/DaudEncoding.htm
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