Klarinet Archive - Posting 001474.txt from 2000/10

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Umlauts, etc.
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 15:17:42 -0500

This thread has looked surreal on my screen! The keystrokes that various
people indicate will produce umlauts, accent marks and so forth invariably
show up here as gibberish symbols, after they've gone through the sender's
e-mail server, the klarinet list transmission and AOL e-mail download to my
floppy disk. Somewhere along the line, some incompatibility garbles the
symbols.

There's more than one version of the ASCII extended character set. Also, the
ASCII text sets aren't the same as the word processors' proprietary character
sets. I've got two different and incompatible international ASCII character
sets between WordPerfect 6.0a (which also has its own proprietary
international character set that looks great in my own documents but comes
out as typographical jumble if I save the same documents as ASCII text files)
and a two-year-old version of MS Word. Neither of these meshes well with the
ASCII "international" character set on my husband's newer computer -- or the
set on AOL, which is also incompatible with both his and my ASCII set.
Documents that look all right when I read them as e-mail online get garbled
when I save them in *apparently* the same ASCII text format to a floppy disk.
Until we've got a worldwide, truly standardized character set, I think we're
more readable if we stick with alphabetical spellings and the most basic
punctuation marks.

Lelia

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