From: Paul O Bartlett <pobart(_at_)access(_dot_)digex(_dot_)net>
Newsgroups: comp.mail.pine
Subject: Viewing Microsoft's Abominations
....
Many times I have seen, as I am sure others have as well, in emails
and newsgroup postings funny characters where context would lead one to
think punctuation marks should be, especially various flavors of double
and backward and forward single quote marks. Something I commonly see
with my setup is circumflex-plus-uppercase-O-tilde.
As nearly as I can tell, such messages seem to be coming from naive
users employing that brain dead mess called Windows. They compose with
Microsoft Word, perhaps, and then cut and paste directly into a window
for sending email, not knowing that Word (or whatever) does jiggery
pokery internally, so that if they do not save the file first in ASCII
format, the jiggery pokery gets transferred directly into the message
that goes out into the 'net. Hence the garbage that appears, they not
knowing that what they see on their screen is not what others see.
I don't know about WinDoze (LoseDoze? and Dese too?) but I know that this
happens with data from Microsoft Word AND other programs on Macintosh.
(Even a mail program called QuickMail does it.) Macintosh, like the PC,
uses ASCII plus its own upper half, rather than ISOLatin1. Even if you save
"text only" you are not converting the special characters to any standard.
"text only" just means that all the margins, font sizes, font changes, etc.
are removed. So, much as I like to bash Mickey$oft, this time they're not
completely at fault.
(If they do know, they may not want to go through the extra steps
it takes to conform to international standards. Apparently the fine,
fine folks who brought us Windows, Internut Exploder, and NutScrape
seem to think that international standards apply to everybody else but
not to them.)
Nyetscrape doesn't come from Microsoft, but it does have the same problem.
I think the definition is,
Standard - n., 1. Using our product. 2. Designing _your_ product so
as to acknowledge _our_ superior wisdom.
Note that IBM had the same viewpoint in 1988. After nearly the whole word
had adopted the fairly well-done keyboard layout of the Selectric
typewriter, the PC came out with the ergonomic disaster of shift keys
surrounded by other modifier keys. Not to mention the significant
relocation of keys other than the basic alphabet. "We're IBM. They'll
adapt." And soon, all the other manufacturers made sure we adapted.
Does anyone have, which he or she is willing to share, a command
pipe or display filter which will translate these Microsoft horrors
into something humanly readable? [NOTE: pipe and display filter here
refer to Pine features.]
You'll probably get a good answer here. If not, send me samples and I'll
send you a Unix one-liner that fixes them. But my fix would have a minor
problem: It would change legitimate ISOLatin1 to look a little funny. Do
you have a reliable way to distinguish the "abominations" from the rest?