(I know "character set" is a risky term to use :)

Basically, I'm wondering what's courteous to use here.

Surely, 7-bit "low ASCII" is OK, beyond question.

Latin-1 / ISO 8859-1 ought to be OK, but are some subscribers
still using Macs which have some Latin-1 incompatibilities?

"Latin0" (ISO 8859-15(?), which includes the Euro sign, is
almost identical to Latin-1, iirc, and should be acceptable.

However, going farther afield, the Microsoft WGL4 character
set (roughly 650 glyphs) might in some instance be bad
manners, although very nice!

I consider the M$ Windows-1252 and related codepages to be
discourteous; their "smart quotes" look nice, but are often
rendered as nonexistent glyphs.

Full-blown Unicode (probably as utf-8) would, I'd say, be
discourteous; relatively few subscribers, I suspect, have the
necessary support for most or all of Unicode.

Fwiw, the Opera 6.05 e-mail composer, which I'm using just
now, can create a message containing most Unicode characters
on the screen, but the support for sending it properly is not
there, afaik. (I do have Arial Unicode, if someone needs it
and can't get it from Microsoft. Haven't tried, lately.
It's ~23 MB, though!)

[If anyone wants to use Latin-1 (or any other Latin-[n]) on
an MS-DOS machine, you can set up Codepage 819, which is
exactly Latin-1, but normally rejected by DOS. Kosta Kostis
(who lives in Germany) set up a collection of codepages for
ISO-8859 up through about 10, some year ago, along with
replacement DOS commands. You do lose the box and other
graphics, though. I used Codepage 819 extensively a few years
ago for e-mail and Web browsing.
Go to <http://www.kostis.net/freeware/indexe.htm> and look at
the first file; some others might be of use.]


Nicholas Bodley ||@|| Waltham, Mass.
Why use Opera? http://tntluoma.com/opera/lover/
Sent via TheWorld.com

Why is it that so many people maybe 45 years old and younger
cannot spell "lose" and "breathe" correctly? It definitely
looks like a generational thing. These people might well
spell almost every other word correctly.

Will "alot" be a legit. dictionary word by 2030?