Re: Effect on number agreement when new numbers arise

David wrote:
> Pete also wrote:
>
> <<>(B (Jhttp://dedalvs.free.fr/(B
>
> By the way, where are all these strange characters coming from? I've had to
> edit them out of all the previous lines manually.>>
>
> I have no idea.
It appears that your message was, for some reason best known to your
mailer, encoded as ISO-2022-JP - and each line had ESC ( J (switch to
"JIS X 0201-1976 Roman") at the beginning and ESC ( B (switch to
"ASCII (ANSI X3.4-1986)") at the end of each line.

>  My copy of the message doesn't have any strange
> characters (well, except the strange box it put where you put a
> thorn in the name of your language).
And that was probably the cause - your system couldn't display the
thorn (since it's not in the Mac standard character set, I believe),
and your mailer apparently used the Japanese "geta mark" to replace
it. AFAIK, using that mark to replace a character that's not in the
current font is moderately common in Japanese contexts, but given that
we're not using Sino-Japanese characters, the usage is a bit unusual.

And since this Japanese character was in the message, your mailer
decided to encode the entire thing in ISO-2022-JP, which makes eminent
sense for email. The problem is, why did it put that symbol in the
message to begin with?

Incidentally, I also find it a bit annoying that your messages contain
both an HTML and a plain-text payload, especially since it makes
quoting your message more difficult - Gmail doesn't automatically add
> signs when quoting an HTML message portion, and that is the portion
it displays by default if a a message has both HTML and plain text.

Your quotes, set off with <<....>> rather than with > at the beginning
of each line, also make it a bit more difficult to see what's a quote;
Gmail colours quotations differently, but relies either on that
punctuation or on having seen a given line of text before in another
email (which means that the first and last line of your quotations are
not coloured, since the << >> characters did not appear in the line
youa re quoting).

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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