Re: In Search Of......Oethala

On 24 Aug 02, at 10:24, Peter Clark wrote:

>         Probably a matter of fonts or encoding, because on my Linux
> box, I could see them fine. Except when I hit reply, at which point
> they turned into little boxes. Copy + paste restored them. Looking at
> Barbara's email, I see that it was sent in iso-8859-1 encoding, which
> makes sense.
No, it doesn't; iso-8859-1 doesn't have o-e ligature (neither capital
nor small). Windows codepage 1252 (which is a superset of iso-8859-1,
at least as regards printable characters) does.

This is the reason why o-e ligature, s-caron, Y-umlaut (capital only),
the euro sign, florin sign, MS "smart quotes", trademark character, ...
cause problems when a Windows user sends them. Other Windows users may
or may not display the result correctly (depending on how strictly they
interpret "iso-8859-1"), but people on other platforms most likely will
not.

Either use iso-8859-15, which does have o-e ligature and s-caron and
the euro sign (and some others) or utf-8. However, support for both is
still not perfect. (My email client, for example, can only handle iso-
8859-1 or Windows-1252, though my newsreader can deal with those and
iso-8859-15 and utf-8, and a fair number of other encodings.)

> The 'fixed' font might not be 8859-1 compatible.
The o-e is not 8859-1 compatible. Do not use :)

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