Is Unicode welcome yet on the list?

[Richard B Mahoney]

Dear Gentle Reader,

On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 05:50:42PM -0800, Stefan Baums wrote:

> Dear List,
>
> since all the major operating systems and email clients have come to
> support Unicode by now (even though it might require some
> configuration), I was wondering whether its use for sending email
> messages with proper diacritics (instead of Harvard-Kyoto
> "transliteration") might be welcome on this list, or in other words,
> how many of the participants do not yet use software supporting it.
> As a test, here's the half-"sloka of my last post in proper Unicode
> encoding:
>
>    n??sty udyamasamo bandhu??? kurv?????o n??vas??dati

This issue seems to be arising everywhere.

As you can see my mailer---Mutt---fails the test, perhaps because its
a text based mailer that defaults to iso-8859-1, I'm not sure.

But for all that I like my mailer the way it is. Its fast, it does
threading, I never have to touch the mouse, it runs in a terminal, it
can easily process more than 300 messages a day in less than 20
minutes ... and so on 8-).

On the whole, I prefer US-ASCII or iso-8859-1 for e-mail. With
transliteration I find it perfectly adequate. I suppose its main
advantage is that absolutely everyone can read it---no matter how
ancient their software or beast.

And here comes the link ...

  http://www.lemis.com/email/email-charset.html


Many regards,

 Richard Mahoney


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+----------------------- Richard Mahoney -----------------------+
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