Re: Tech: Unicode (was...)

Philippe Caquant wrote:
>
> The method you describe below would be considerably
> simplified if you used coding and decoding macros
> (which I was trying to explain). So you wouldn't have
> to find the hex Unicodes, the macro would do it for
> you ! (that's what macros are intended for, usually:
> saving time and errors)
>
> If you have the right macro, you could have in one
> window the e-mail message, in another window a Word
> document including the macro, so you would just do
> copy/pastes and button-clickings (for ex) to translate
> everything properly, without having to think about
> anything. You don't have to know whether the
> characters are Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebraic or whatever,
> the macro will show you the result anyway ! And the
> macro could of course be shared among all users
> (again, copy + paste, once for all). You wouldn't have
> to rewrite it, except in case you don't use Word, of
> course.
The problem is that your macros are redundant. There's already a way of
getting 8-bit characters over a 7-bit communication channel: it's called
MIME Content-Encoding: quoted-printable. Characters from 0-127 besides
"=" are preserved intact, characters from 128-255 are an "=" followed by
the hex code, and IIRC the equals sign is "==". MIME-aware mailreaders
will decode it automatically.

Reply