Re: Encoding (was Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers (meta-messag)

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 15:23:04 +0200, Dan Sulani <Dansulani@...> wrote:
> How is _this_ post coming through?
iso-8859-1

> What format _should_ I be using? ISO? Windows? Western Europe?
iso-8859-1 is good, unless you're using certain characters such as
"smart quotes" or em dashes, in which case windows-1252 (aka "Western
Europe") is more honest.

> Eastern Europe?
I assume this is either windows-1250 or iso-8859-2; either should
work, but you should probably only use those if you need certain
Eastern European characters (e.g. Polish letters such as e-ogonek or
n-acute, or Hungarian o-with-double-acute, etc.).

> Unicode (which one?)?
Hm... UTF-8 is probably the most widely-supported (by email programs)
encoding for Unicode, but occasionally, UTF-8 characters are mangled
by the list. (I believe it depends on which bytes are used to encode a
given character, so only certain character ranges are affected.)

UTF-7 is list-safe but not quite as widely-supported.

In general, though, I'd use the first one from this list that contains
all the characters you want to send: us-ascii, iso-8859-1,
windows-1252, utf-8.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Watch the Reply-To!