Re: META: Unicode rules / test

I'm pretty sure we no longer have to worry about the list software
munging individual messages.  That is not the problem.  The problems
are

(1) Digests - the list software seems to use a non-MIME digest format,
which forces all messages in a given digest to be given only a single
character set label, but then doesn't actually convert them all to the
same character set.

2) Mail user agents - various subscribers are for various reasons
unable to see the Unicode characters even if they make it through
intact.

So by all means use Unicode - but where the Unicode text is critical
to the content of the message, please provide an alternative
representaion in ASCII (not Latin-1, because if you have Unicode chars
it will be upcoded to UTF-8 anyway...).



On 12/16/08, Paul Bennett <paul.w.bennett@...> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:33 PM, maikxlx <maikxlx@...> wrote:
>> Apologies if this has been already asked, but what are the rules for using
>> Unicode on the CONLANG list?  I couldn't find any guidelines via Google.
>
> Absent all other concerns, I'd strongly encourage full Unicode use at
> every turn.
>
> Note, however, that some of our readers are sight-impaired, and use
> screen-reading software to speak posts for them. Other readers are
> constrained to some other plain-text email client by other factors.
> For maximum "audience penetration", you ought to provide a plain ASCII
> (i.e. USASCII-68) version of anything that uses non-ASCII characters.
>
> For instance, it's typical when providing a plain ASCII transcription
> to write a following apostrophe for an acute accent, or a following
> caron for a circumflex accent.
>
> As far as using Unicode to write things in the IPA, that's
> traditionally transcribed into something called CXS, which is an
> easier-to-type variant of X-Sampa, which itself is a variant of SAMPA,
> a long-standing standard for representing the IPA in plain ASCII.
>
> For more information on CXS, see http://www.theiling.de/ipa/ and for
> more on SAMPA and X-Sampa see http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/
> and/or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAMPA
>
>
>
>
> Paul
>
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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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