Content transfer encoding (Was: Re: Graphemes defined)

{I'm dropping into the middle of this, because I have an e-mail backlog.}

On Tue, 11 May 2004 08:46:09 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> Berthold Frommann wrote:
>>
>> Mr. Daniels,
>>
>> > Why aren't the seven basic brushstrokes the "graphemes" of Chinese?
>> > Aren't they much more the "atoms" of Chinese writing?

[...]

>> Well, regarding Han-characters, there are quite a lot of graphical
>> elements
>> which do have a meaning but are not part of any of the various lists of
>> "radicals" (the most frequently used being the Kangxi-radical system).
>>
>> (e.g. $B;{(B ("temple"), which appears in many characters ($B;m(B,
>> $B;x(B, $B;~(B, $BFC(B...)
>> but is NOT a Kangxi-radical.)

> So why is something that has "incomplete subsets" (whatever those are)
> (I can't see whatever you typed in Chinese)

I think we have here a practical example of why content-transfer encoding
can be important in e-mail. Especially for Qalam, we need e-mail programs
("clients") as well as communication paths that are Unicode-capable. I'm
sending this in UTF-8, for instance. Just as a test, here's U+5973: 女.

Someone here was sending in US-ASCII(!), I won't say who...

As I send, I see several "no-such-glyph" square blocks in the character
strings above that were originally Chinese.

Regards,

NB

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz:
very-short sentence, all 26 letters
Opera Beta 1, Build 3772, using M2