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

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Saturday, August 24, 2002, 18:30
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@...>