In article , Bill Wright wrote:
> > Pound signs - £ - seem topresent fine in Agent.
> >
> > May I humbly suggest you try Agent in preference to outlook Express?
> 
> I get £ signs with no problem. It's these people with weird non-Microsoft 
> software who seem to have problems.

It isn't anything to do with Microsoft. It's to do with code tables, and the 
fact that there are several of them because only the first 7 bits are 
standardised. I use a non-Microsoft newsreader and both the pound signs 
above are shown as they should be. We must all be using the same code table.

It's only really safe to use non-ASCII characters in a document you will be 
printing yourself, and best not to if you want to send it to other people 
whose computer setups you do not know.

Rod.

In article ,
   Roderick Stewart  wrote:
> In article , Bill Wright wrote:
> > > Pound signs - £ - seem topresent fine in Agent.
> > >
> > > May I humbly suggest you try Agent in preference to outlook Express?
> > 
> > I get £ signs with no problem. It's these people with weird
> > non-Microsoft  software who seem to have problems.

> It isn't anything to do with Microsoft. It's to do with code tables, and
> the fact that there are several of them because only the first 7 bits
> are standardised. I use a non-Microsoft newsreader and both the pound
> signs above are shown as they should be. We must all be using the same
> code table.

> It's only really safe to use non-ASCII characters in a document you will
> be printing yourself, and best not to if you want to send it to other
> people whose computer setups you do not know.

I'd guess Bill understands all this by now - even if he didn't before,
which I doubt. Never stopped him making a quip, though.

-- 
*Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.

    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Roderick Stewart wrote:

> It isn't anything to do with Microsoft. It's to do with code
> tables, and the fact that there are several of them because
> only the first 7 bits are standardised.

Well, there's always EBCDIC and the national variants of 7-bit ASCII to 
break that illusion! ;)

Additionally, Microsoft is in no small part responsible for breaking 
things because their standard news/email software, Outlook Express, 
ships with default settings that make it not to advertise the character 
encoding in the messages. (This can be corrected by changing the 
settings, but how many OE users actually will, unless given specific 
instructions on how to do it and the reasoning behind the whole thing?)

However, OE accepts and decodes messages in the weirdest character 
encodings gladly if only the sender identifies the set he is using... in 
the headers.

> I use a non-Microsoft newsreader and both the pound signs above
> are shown as they should be. We must all be using the same code
> table.

PeterT's post with the pound sign did have the "Content-type" header, 
and the charset parameter on that header line correctly identified the 
character encoding he was using, so in that case, the pound sign working 
was quite unremarkable (and if it hadn't worked, you would only have the 
newsreader software you use to blame.)

On the other hand, Bill's post didn't include this header, so the pound 
sign showing up in his message was, as you say, mostly a lucky 
coincidence of both sides using the same default encoding.

> It's only really safe to use non-ASCII characters in a document you
> will be printing yourself, and best not to if you want to send it to
> other people whose computer setups you do not know.

Most modern newsreaders are now aware of the Content-Type header and its 
charset parameter, and will decode the incoming messages accordingly. 
It's only the handful of people who are using very old versions of old 
UNIX newsreader software (trn, slrn, what have you) that may still be 
having real problems - especially if their system administrator has no 
plans for upgrading those programs to newer versions.

Of course, OE's default settings don't help the matters... but 
fortunately that can be fixed for anyone wanting to use OE and non-ASCII 
characters in his posts, just by tweaking a couple of settings in the 
menus - and even with the default settings, OE will decode other 
people's posts correctly.

So it's not hopeless in any way - millions of people are communicating 
with each other every day using non-ASCII character encodings, and 
things are actually pretty good these days as far as the 
internationalization support in computer software goes - but making 
things work and resolving the problems when they don't (and correctly 
determining the party at fault) does require some technical knowledge on 
the character encodings, the quirks and idiosynchrasies of certain 
programs, the format of Usenet messages, and whatnot.

-- 
znark