Nicholas Bodley wrote:

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

This issue was raised in the past and, in one of my rare moments of
democracy, I started a poll to ask memebers what they considered more
appropriate. See the results here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/surveys?id=386381

As you see, several members indicated UTF-8 as a proper choice
(because, I think, it allows to encode all the possible character
that might be needed in discussion about writing systems), but an
equal number of members indicated that the choice of the encoding
should be free and left to each memeber (and MIME charset tagging
exists exactly to allow this possibility).

> 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.

For historical reasons, many members of Qalam are also members of the
mailing lists of the Unicode Consortium
(http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html), and have some
degree of experience and interested in Unicode.

For this reason, and because members of Qalam are supposed to have an
interest in writing systems, I think that several members might have
Unicode support.

However, when someone needs to show characters in uncommon scripts,
it is a good idea to also add a textual description and/or a picture
of those characters. This is a kind thing to do, because even people
having Unicode support could lack font for that particular script.

Pictures or other files (PDF's, etc.) can be freely attached to
messages, or they can be uploaded on Qalam's "Files" or "Photos"
sections:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/files
http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/lst

Regards.
Seshat (Qalam moderator)