[MlMt] Writing in a format that is not utf 8

[Bill Cole]

On 9 Feb 2012, at 3:11, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> On 9 Feb 2012, at 8:19, Alan Schmitt wrote:
>
>> I interact with a computer program by email (a Diplomacy judge to be 
>> precise) that mangles text with accents. It seems it's because I send 
>> the messages as utf 8 but it interprets and forwards them as 
>> ISO-8859-1. Is there a way to tell MailMate to send a particular 
>> message in a different encoding?
>
> No. I was also hoping such problems were an issue of the past.

That's a refreshing bit of optimism, but sadly it does not yet reflect 
the real world. Despite a wealth of obviously right ways to do things 
like picking a message charset and encoding, legacy code and sclerotic 
wetware persist in perverse bugginess.


> At least, you are the first to ask about this. Any chance that this 
> (serious) bug could be fixed in the receiving computer program?
>
> Anyone else on the list with similar problems?

Yes and no. I have not encountered this yet with MM because I had a very 
slow transition from TBird, but there is a small subset of my *human* 
correspondents whose mail clients know nothing of utf-8 and who instead 
use either some Windows 'code page' (CP1252 being one, aka 'almost 
Latin-1', but I've also had need to use Indian and Chinese encodings ) 
or can only handle pure ASCII as the Elder Gods intended. This only 
forces me into a specific encoding randomly a few times per year but 
when I need a non-utf-8 encoding, I REALLY need it. It would probably be 
adequate for my needs to have a mode to force/squish/transliterate a 
message into ASCII since even when I am mailing someone who prefers 
Hindi or Cantonese, I am always only writing US English. (I am cultural 
imperialism in action!)

-- 
Bill Cole