[rescue] UTF-8 [was what can you do with an Apple Quadro 840AV]

[Mike Meredith]

On Tue, 3 Apr 2018 17:04:03 -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> That UTF-8 is preferable to other character encodings?

I would argue yes it is, or at least Unicode is. Having one universal
encoding for graphemes is important (I used to spend a considerable
amount of time 'rescuing' text that had been mangled in some way, and
when you're talking about non-latin text, that mangling can remove the
meaning).

> That it's the list owner's fault the mail list software doesn't
> cleanly handle UTF-8?

I believe that it's Bill's _choice_ that this list runs the messages
through demime. Not an uncommon decision back in the day (it was a
common spam signature at one point).

I'm pretty sure Mailman handles UTF-8 reasonably well - back in the day
I helped run a mailing list whose purpose was the
discussion of ancient Slavonic graphemes for a proposed (and accepted)
Unicode block.

> That it's the reader's fault the mail list software doesn't cleanly
> handle UTF-8?

Nope. The mailing list mangles the encoding by forcing it into US-ASCII.

> That curly quotes are the responsibility of the person doing layout?

Curly quotes are probably the least important reason for 'fixing' this.
Some software will automatically try to change quotes into curly quotes
when sending messages which involves taking an ASCII message and
transforming it into a UTF-8 message (curly quotes are encoded
differently). Ideally demime would change those quotes back again.

--
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  bIf there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult
   than religion.b
   b Edmond de Goncourt

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]