How Do I Make Eudora Show Chinese Text?

[w...@taiwan.com]

I am using Eudora V7 in XP SP3. I receive some emails with Chinese
ideographic texts. These emails show the Chinese in Gmail and
Outlook Express, and even my Firefox browser. But not in my Eudora.

I have tried the suggestions I found in Google, but I still do not
get the Chinese.

Can anyone suggest a solution for me to try?

XieXie
WeiLienShi

[John H Meyers]

On 6/2/2013 7:46 AM:

> I am using Eudora V7 in XP SP3. I receive some emails with Chinese
> ideographic texts. These emails show the Chinese in Gmail and
> Outlook Express, and even my Firefox browser. But not in my Eudora.
>
> I have tried the suggestions I found in Google

Which suggestions?

There may exist a way for any case, but it varies according to
how the sender encoded the Chinese text, as well as what
software you may have installed at your end.

The following work with older sending/receiving methods:

<http://email.cityu.edu.hk/faq/eudora_plaintext.htm>

<http://www.white-clouds.com/iclc/cliej/cl16eng-email-eudora.htm>

Unicode and UTF-8 were created to handle all languages
under a single framework without changing settings;
Eudora did not incorporate this universal framework,
but in some cases you might be able
to get either the "Microsoft viewer" or a second program
to interpret whatever you have received in UTF-8 encoding.

When you use other programs (or webmail) instead of Eudora,
the matter gets simplified further, in that generally,
as you have already observed, everything is properly displayed,
with no need to "tinker around until one of many attempts finally works."

--

[Brana Bujenovic]

Try this:
1. Download Greek Message Viewer plugin from here:
http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/viewer.zip

2. Unzip, move files viewer.dll and viewer.txt, to the plugins folder of
Eudora's main data folder.

3. Start Eudora, open the message in Chinese, hit Message Plugins/Message
Viewer from the Edit menu.

4. If it doesn't look right, choose the code page from View/Character
Encoding menu.
There are 2 Chinese code pages to choose from, and the Unicode.

If the message contains both English/Latin and Chinese letters, its
probably Unicode (UTF-8).

For reading:
If you have text-to-speech engine installed (OS), select the text and
choose Selection/Read/Microsoft Lili (Chinese). Viewer supports 3rd party
speech engines, so if they are installed it should recognize them and
display on menus (for example eSpeak-Chinese).


w...@taiwan.com wrote in news:rjfmq8ddcusmqn7cp...@4ax.com:

--

[John H Meyers]

On 6/12/2013 3:28 PM, Brana Bujenovic wrote:

> Try this:
> 1. Download Greek Message Viewer plugin from here:
> http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/viewer.zip

Hi, Brana!

Is this the solution to reading all UTF-8 messages
(in other words, could everyone remove UTF8ISO and use this instead?)

Thanks.

--

[Brana Bujenovic]

John H Meyers <jhme...@nomail.invalid> wrote in
news:51B915C5...@nomail.invalid:

> On 6/12/2013 3:28 PM, Brana Bujenovic wrote:
>
>> Try this:
>> 1. Download Greek Message Viewer plugin from here:
>> http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/viewer.zip
>
> Hi, Brana!
>
> Is this the solution to reading all UTF-8 messages

John, good to see this group alive a kicking.

It is. You should be able to see and read all the messages, the way the
were intended to be read (Unicode, all of it; also major non-Unicode
encodings ISO/Windows).

> (in other words, could everyone remove UTF8ISO and use this instead?)
>
> Thanks.
>

As for the other plugins - not necessarily. I did not write that one, but
if I remmeber well it decodes MIME-encoded headers, so Eudora does not
display "ISO-etc" in mailbox summary and Subject-box, nothing wrong with
that.

[John H Meyers]

On 6/12/2013 9:36 PM, Brana Bujenovic contributed:

>> (in other words, could everyone remove UTF8ISO and use this instead?)

> As for the other plugins - not necessarily. I did not write that one

UTF8ISO lives here: <http://www.windharp.de/software/utf8iso.htm>

It's by Daniel Kuhn, is no longer maintained,
and is believed to have some bugs (particularly in regard
to decoding base64), so with certain of its options set,
combined with certain particular input (especially if HTML),
it may badly mangle messages instead of clarifying them.

It is also based solely on replacing every UTF-8 symbol
with a one-byte symbol chosen from the ISO-8859-1 character set;
for example, each multi-byte "curly quote" is replaced with
a one-byte ascii single-quote ['] or double-quote ["],
regardless of whether the original symbol was the
"start of a quote" symbol or the "end of a quote" symbol,
so it's only a rough mapping of all input
to a single-byte-per-character output character set.

That plugin is thus suited almost exclusively for
Western European languages, where only a few non-ascii symbols
(e.g. accented letters or non-English letters) are required,
and would be useless for Chinese and similar languages,
for which Mr. Kuhn says: "Mixed messages (say Japanese and German)
have the German part displayed correctly in Eudora
and the Japanese part displayed correctly when sent to browser."
[I don't know that "Send to Browser" actually works, however]

> but if I remember well it decodes MIME-encoded headers,

> so Eudora does not display "ISO-etc" in mailbox summary and Subject-box

Kuhn says: The "subject" line Eudora shows in its table is not converted.
Due to limitations in the API Eudora provides, those headers can't be changed.
If you look at the headers inside the mail you can see it converted there."
[possibly still not, since the header area is "locked" there?]

I thought that Eudora itself manages to process "encoded words" within headers
specifying UTF-8, but only if the encoding method is Q[uoted-printable]
rather than B[ase64] -- but you're the expert who has written many
plugins, while I am currently guessing from dim memory and never writing one ;-)

At any rate, based on thinking that UTF8ISO might conflict with your plugin,
I would lean toward removing it when trying your alternate viewer.

Thanks for your many useful Eudora (and other) plugins:
<http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/>
<http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/plugins.htm>

--

[Brana Bujenovic]

John H Meyers <jhme...@nomail.invalid> wrote in

news:51B93DEA...@nomail.invalid:

<...>

> At any rate, based on thinking that UTF8ISO might conflict with your
> plugin, I would lean toward removing it when trying your alternate
> viewer.

Right, then no need for all that anymore. Viewer "prefers" messages intact
(as received from the server).

If that plugin changes the actual message base (content of a mbx file); on
arrival or manually, conflict may exist in a sense that these messages
(after changing some characters) may not comply with Unicode standard
anymore. (Also, if you edit the message with Eudora's internal editor,
change formatting, then save it, Unicode characters may be gone, replaced
with question marks. Then Viewer won't be able to help either.).

Even though ol Eudora does not support Unicode, it initially saves the text
ASIS (it just does not display it the right way). Viewer takes the
advantage of that.

> Thanks for your many useful Eudora (and other) plugins:
> <http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/>
> <http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/plugins.htm>
>

Welcome.

[micky]

On Sun, 02 Jun 2013 15:13:18 -0400, Dennis Lee Bieber
<wlf...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>On Sun, 02 Jun 2013 08:46:25 -0400, w...@taiwan.com declaimed the
>following in comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows:

> Not what you'll want to hear: Find a different email program.
>
> Eudora is NOT UTF8 aware -- it only handles the ISO-Latin-1
>(iso-8859-1) character set (well, maybe -15 Euro set, but it is
>basically limited to a single 256-character 8-bit code set).

I'm not sure if this contradicts you or not, but I've gotten it to
display Hebrew, and to right-justify the text, as should be the case
with Hebrew. I'm not sure how I did it, right now, but I posted
about it at the time. I think I copied someone else's method.

I haven't tried to get it to let me write in Hebrew,

Of course unpointed Hebrew has only 24 letters, iirc.





> Qualcomm gave up on Eudora before implementing UTF8 (heck -- maybe
>that's a reason they did give up on it; having to recode it to handle
>multi-byte character sets and the concommitant need to access unicode
>fonts for the newer email RFCs)

[John H Meyers]

My first attempt to post this reply using UTF-8 character encoding,
including a few words of Chinese and Hebrew text, resulted in
Thunderbird (which I'm using for newsgroups) sending
a completely empty message body, rather than what I composed.

So this time, I will have to omit some of the text and try again:

Responding to micky's message of 6/16/2013 12:10 AM

Elsewhere in this thread is mention of a different "viewer" plugin
by Brana Bujenovic, with which I have displayed a message
containing English, some Chinese, and some Hebrew,
all in the same message,
sent as "plain text" with UTF-8 character set.

The result for this one example came out perfect
only with the following combination of settings and selections:

o "Use Microsoft's Viewer" in Eudora to open the message, then
o Message Viewer - Plain Text
o View > Encoding > UTF-8 in Brana's viewer.

This does not assure perfect results for all input
and desired viewing modes, but "hope is on the horizon" :)

Once you have installed the plugin into Eudora,
you can customize Eudora's main toolbar
to add buttons for these functions:

o Message Viewer - Plain Text
o Message Viewer - HTML

Like some of Eudora's built-in tool buttons
(e.g. "Find Text" vs. "Find Messages"),
the above pair of buttons has identical icons,
but can be distinguished either by hovering
to view a "tooltip" or simply remembering
in which order you placed them on the toolbar :)

I haven't found any way to assume UTF-8 in Brana's viewer,
without having to navigate to it every time,
although there is a viewer.ini file which stores some plugin settings
(any ideas on that, Brana?).

Each independent "viewer" window shows its current encoding in its
lower right corner, but you can't just click on that to change it.

Note that messages containing languages such as Chinese and Hebrew
can often be encoded in different ways, e.g. "Hebrew" could mean
ISO-8859-8, Windows-1255, or UTF-8, "Chinese" has four choices
for encoding in Thunderbird, only three choices as listed in
Brana's viewer for Eudora, and only one of these (UTF-8)
has a common description in both Thunderbird and "Eudora with viewer."

Let's see whether I can copy and paste some sample text,
copied from the web pages shown, so that you can determine
whether the original is faithfully rendered if you forward
a copy of this post (hopefully UTF-8 encoded) to yourself:

Chinese [snip example]
is a group of related language varieties
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language>

Hebrew [snip example]
is a West Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language>

> I haven't tried to get it to let me write in Hebrew

As to composing UTF-8 to send from Eudora,
the only way I can think of is to save the encoded message
in a separate file, then use Eudora to send it.

Eudora for Windows supports a command line interface,
with which you can queue externally generated messages.
The mechanism allows any kind of MIME message to be sent,
even ones that can not normally be generated by Eudora
(a similar result can be achieved on the Mac
using Apple Script and Apple Events):
<http://web.archive.org/web/20060909000649/http://www.eudora.com/developers/cmndline.html>

Shalom [had to snip actual Hebrew word]

--