On Saturday, November 16, 2013 at 9:38:50 PM UTC-4, John H Meyers wrote:
On 11/15/2013 10:27 AM, Lizzie wrote:
My Eudora 7.1 gets emails from someone using Windows Live Mail in which a single apostrophe in the text is replaced by these 3 characters: ’
(In case that looks wrong, the characters are: letter "a" with a circumflex, Euro currency sign, TM in upper script.)
How can I avoid this?
The character in question is _not_ "an apostrophe"
That is to say, it is not this character between brackets [']
which is an "ascii" (7-bit) common keyboard character
used for both opening and closing single quotes
and as an apostrophe in plain 7-bit text.
It is instead a sequence of three bytes representing
a "curly quote" or "curly apostrophe" in UTF-8,
which is a variable-length-per-character
universal character encoding scheme for all languages
that Eudora was never programmed to deal with.
Leo Notenboom has a well-written explanation about UTF-8: <http://ask-leo.com/why_do_i_get_odd_characters_instead_of_quotes_in_my_documents.html>
Two approaches have been taken by writers of external plugins for Eudora, designed to help Eudora to display incoming UTF-8 encoded messages:
UTF8ISO -- this plugin substitutes an 8-bit character from an ISO-8859-x character set for each original UTF-8 multi-byte sequence. For example,
it replaces each 3-byte UTF-8 "curly apostrophe" with an "ascii apostrophe," to give a close-enough approximation to display many Western European languages,
although it would be impossible to handle Chinese in this way, for example, because Chinese has far more than 256 possible "characters."
"Greek Viewer" by Brana Bujenovic -- this plugin opens messages in separate windows that are positioned right over Eudora's windows, and appears to
fill those windows using web browser display modules, which then allow you to choose different character encodings (including UTF-8) to display the true original content, even if it happens to be Chinese, for example.
UTF8ISO is known to have problematic bugs, particularly with original messages
which have had "base64" encoding applied after UTF-8 encoding, sometimes completely mangling original messages which could have been read well enough even if occasional "curly quotes" had not been transformed for you.
The "Greek Viewer," on the other hand, seems not to have those problems,
and of course also displays the true characters of all languages,
rather than a few limited ISO 8-bit character substitutions,
provided that your computer has the resources (fonts, etc.) to do that.
Additional references and sources:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8> <http://windharp.de/software/utf8iso.htm> <http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/plugins.htm> <http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/viewer.zip>
So, is this still the current and best solution? I'm working with real estate agents in Puerto Rico and they use a lot of accented characters. This is making it very hard to respond to without the emails being totally borked up. I'm also seeing Â
periodically in the emails, which I think is a result of a UTF-8 end of line marker, according to another post I read. Will that also be fixed by using the Greek viewer?
--
Rick C. (Lorem Ipsum)
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https://ts.la/richard11209
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