MessengerPro v. Outlook 2007
Alex Cessford
I receive many emails from Windows users but I have a oddity in
messages from one person. All his emails when displayed by
MessengerPro v.5.13 on my Iyonix show the apostrophe as the
left-facing arrowhead, (next to the M on the keyboard), instead.
When I queried it with him, he said he was using the apostrophe key
properly and it must be my email program. I never get it with anyone
else, so it cannot be MPro doing this, and I told him so.
He then said that he was using Outlook 2007 with all settings just at
their defaults, he hasn't messed with anything, and also that no-one
else he sends messages to sees this on their machines/programs.
It's no big deal of course, but I'm curious. Any ideas?
--
Alex.
Ray Dawson
> All his emails when displayed by MessengerPro v.5.13 on my Iyonix show the
> apostrophe as the left-facing arrowhead, (next to the M on the keyboard),
> instead.
These are smart quotes being sent by his email program, Outlook, and wrongly
translated on the RISC OS side. Maybe Messenger Pro isn't reading the top
bit set code correctly, or it could just be the fact that RISC OS TBS codes
don't agree with the Windows ones.
You could always ask him to send in plain text to you with only 7 bit
characters.
Cheers,
Ray D
Alex Cessford
Ray Dawson <r...@magray.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Alex Cessford <al...@cessford.org.uk> wrote:
> Cheers,
> Ray D
I knew somebody on here would be able to set me right about this :-)
Thank you very much Ray.
--
Alex.
Martin Wuerthner
Ray Dawson <r...@magray.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Alex Cessford <al...@cessford.org.uk> wrote:
>> All his emails when displayed by MessengerPro v.5.13 on my Iyonix show the
>> apostrophe as the left-facing arrowhead, (next to the M on the keyboard),
>> instead.
> These are smart quotes being sent by his email program, Outlook, and wrongly
> translated on the RISC OS side.
... or wrongly sent.
> Maybe Messenger Pro isn't reading the top bit set code correctly, or
> it could just be the fact that RISC OS TBS codes don't agree with the
> Windows ones.
... or Outlook sends them incorrectly. Not sure about Outlook 2007,
but messages I receive from Outlook 2003 definitely have incorrect
smart quotes in them. Outlook specifies iso-8859-1 encoding, when in
fact it uses Windows Western encoding, which replaces the control
character range of iso-8859-1 by Windows-specific characters. The
specified encoding, iso-8859-1 does not contain smart quotes, but
Windows Western does. When interpreted according to the standard, the
smart quotes come out as control characters though.
Mind you, MessengerPro does the same. It also happily sends RISC OS
smart quotes and claims iso-8859-1 encoding, so they end up as control
characters.
So, when receving a message in iso-8859-1, MessengerPro assumes it was
sent by a RISC OS client with RISC OS extensions rather than Windows
extensions. That assumption is as good as any, though MPro could do
better than that because it could look at the name of the e-mail
client. When receiving a message from Microsoft Outlook it is a safe
guess that it does not contain RISC OS characters.
So, the bottom line is: Outlook is wrong, but MPro could do better to
work around that problem.
Martin
--
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Alex Cessford
Ray Dawson <r...@magray.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Alex Cessford <al...@cessford.org.uk> wrote:
> Cheers,
> Ray D
Further follow up Ray! Just had a thought.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but when you refer to smart quotes,
isn't that the character produced by the key on the extreme left of
the keyboard, situated (vertically) between the Escape key and the Tab
key?
If I am correct then that would account for it even more, as I use the
apostrophe located on the same key as the @-sign, horizontally between
the semi-colon and the tilde key.
Regards,
--
Alex.
Jeremy Nicoll - news posts
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but when you refer to smart quotes,
> isn't that the character produced by the key on the extreme left of
> the keyboard, situated (vertically) between the Escape key and the Tab
> key?
No, that's backward single-quote.
The 'smart' single & double quotes are the characters that look smart (in
the sense that they are nicer than 'ordinary' single or double quotes)
because they are curved - like 6 and 9 and 66 and 99. There's four smart
quote characters.
--
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Email sent to my from-address will be deleted. Instead, please reply
to newsre...@wingsandbeaks.org.uk replacing "nnn" by "284".
John Williams (News)
Jeremy Nicoll - news posts <jn.nntp....@wingsandbeaks.org.uk> wrote:
> The 'smart' single & double quotes are the characters that look smart (in
> the sense that they are nicer than 'ordinary' single or double quotes)
> because they are curved - like 6 and 9 and 66 and 99. There's four smart
> quote characters.
But they're top-bit set (8 bit) characters, and how they appear depends on
the font.
It's only the 'foreign' accented characters that are (fairly) universal in
western fonts.
As proper e-mail is a text only medium - 7-bit plus some accented
characters if you have 8-bit set - how these 'DTP' characters appear
depends upon the display font and them conforming to the character set
definition - which may or may not be available to a particular client.
This is why we use GBP, for example, instead of the pound sterling sign in
e-mails - to avoid these possible misinterpretations.
The sender is using a 'DTP' type program to compose his e-mails. He
shouldn't, but 'improvements' led by MicroSoft may mean we just have to get
used to it.
I'd never do it, though - but then I'm a pedant.
John
--
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Non-RISC OS posters change user to johnrwilliams or put 'risc' in subject!
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Steve Fryatt
> In article <gemini.kswt9...@wingsandbeaks.org.uk.invalid>,
> Jeremy Nicoll - news posts <jn.nntp....@wingsandbeaks.org.uk>
wrote:
>
> > The 'smart' single & double quotes are the characters that look smart
> > (in the sense that they are nicer than 'ordinary' single or double
> > quotes) because they are curved - like 6 and 9 and 66 and 99. There's
> > four smart quote characters.
>
> But they're top-bit set (8 bit) characters, and how they appear depends on
> the font.
>
> It's only the 'foreign' accented characters that are (fairly) universal in
> western fonts.
Sort-of. In theory, it's actually defined based on the system and encoding
in use: in RISC OS, for example, it's defined based on the current alphabet.
On two RO systems configured to Latin 1, for example, the smart quotes will
always be in the same place (assuming the fonts are correct, which not all
PD ones are).
> As proper e-mail is a text only medium - 7-bit plus some accented
> characters if you have 8-bit set - how these 'DTP' characters appear
> depends upon the display font and them conforming to the character set
> definition - which may or may not be available to a particular client.
>
> This is why we use GBP, for example, instead of the pound sterling sign in
> e-mails - to avoid these possible misinterpretations.
This used to be the case. As others have said, it's now perfectly valid to
include top-bit characters in emails as long as the correct encoding is
specified.
> The sender is using a 'DTP' type program to compose his e-mails. He
> shouldn't, but 'improvements' led by MicroSoft may mean we just have to
> get used to it.
It can be done on RISC OS, using Messenger, Pluto and the like.
--
Steve Fryatt - Leeds, England
Steffen Huber
[snip encoding problems]
Martin, I guess you would also be interested in buying the
T-Shirt which sums it up in two words:
Schei? Encoding
See http://www.getdigital.de/products/scheiss_encoding
We bought it for all the software developers in our
company ;-)
Steffen
--
Steffen Huber
hubersn Software - http://www.hubersn-software.com/
Martin Wuerthner
Steve Fryatt <ne...@stevefryatt.org.uk> wrote:
> "John Williams (News)" <UCE...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
>> This is why we use GBP, for example, instead of the pound sterling sign in
>> e-mails - to avoid these possible misinterpretations.
> This used to be the case. As others have said, it's now perfectly valid to
> include top-bit characters in emails as long as the correct encoding is
> specified.
Yes. The Pounds sign is safe because it is in iso-8559-1 (aka
iso-latin-1), which is the encoding typically used by RISC OS e-mail
clients and understood by all platforms.
Smart quotes are not in iso-8859-1, so you cannot use them in e-mails
with that encoding, i.e., you cannot use them in e-mails sent from
RISC OS clients. These and other characters are bound to come out
incorrectly. In case of doubt look at !Chars: The bottom three rows
are safe. The fourth row from the bottom cannot be used for e-mails.
>> The sender is using a 'DTP' type program to compose his e-mails. He
>> shouldn't, but 'improvements' led by MicroSoft may mean we just have to
>> get used to it.
> It can be done on RISC OS, using Messenger, Pluto and the like.
Yes, and MessengerPro and Pluto make the same mistake as Outlook, just
in a different way, which means that Outlook, MPro and Pluto cannot
understand each other because they all violate the standard and make
assumptions on how others violate the standard.