Daniel G. Szczurek wrote:
> Dear friends,
> That's the only way that I can read your Shavian e-mail
> as well. I have the same problem with Cyrillic, so it
> appears e-mail will not transmit in non-Latin scripts. Am I
> right? I've been told that I need a scanner for these
No; thanks to MIME (Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions, or something
like that), this is no longer true. A mail program can transmit in the
headers what character set and encoding the content has. For example, there
can be a header like "Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"", which
indicates that the contents are plain text, and are to be interpreted in the
ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1) character set, which is commonly used e.g. in
Western Europe. Mail in Cyrillic usually has charset="koi8-r". However, it
is up to the sending e-mail program to put in the correct MIME header, and
up to the receiving e-mail program to interpret the header correctly and to
display the contents appropriately. Finally, this assumes you have correct
fonts.
Since Shavian does not have a charset registered with ISO (and it is
unlikely it ever will -- though there is a proposal to include it in
Unicode, in the CSUR (ConScript Unicode Registry)[1], which is an unofficial
assigner of parts of Unicode's Private Use space (E000-F8FF and
000F0000-0010FFFF) to constructed/artifical scripts), it is usually written
"masquerading" as English characters -- e.g. "Shavian" looks like "SEvWn".
This is not a charset "problem", but a font problem, and plain-text e-mail
doesn't carry font information.
To alleviate this, you need some form of "rich" text (which has markup
information in addition to the text), such as the "rich text" format
supported by Pegasus Mail; Microsoft's RTF (Rich Text Format); or HTML
(Hypertext Mark-up Language). HTML is the most wide-spread of these
alternatives; however, it, too, requires that both sender and receiver of
e-mail understand HTML. Mailers such as Outlook Express and Netscape
Messenger can send and receive e-mail in HTML, and will display characters
in the font specified inside the message, if that font exists on the
reader's computer. If your mail reader does not understand HTML, then what
happens depends on the message format. If it is only in HTML, you will most
likely see the "source code", with lots of HTML tags that look like <P><FONT
FACE="Lionspaw" SIZE=3> etc.; if it is in MIME multi-part/mixed format and
contains the same information in HTML and in plain text, you will probably
see the plain-text alternative; however, you will have lost the font
information and will see "SEvWn" instead of Shavian letters.
> scripts, that I should print the files out, scan them in as
> an image, transfer them to e-mail, and then they will
> transmit by e-mail. Oy vey!! Any other idea is most welcome.
Oy vey indeed! Sending images by mail can make messages very big, and many
people consider that unwelcome.
> I will not be able to afford a scanner until Christmas. And
> I'm sure that everyone of you knows how to do computer
> things better than I do. Thanks for comments! Dan
I believe you have an iMac. I know next to nothing about Macintoshes and
what mail programs are available, and whether e.g. they support HTML or not.
Hope someone else can help you further on this one.
Cheers,
Philip
[1] For more information on CSUR, see
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/csur/index.html in North America and
http://www.indigo.ie/egt/standards/csur/index.html in Europe, which should
have the same content (but apparently one site may lag behind the other in
updating sometimes). According to CSUR, Shavian was registered on 12 Feb
1997 and assigned the range E700-E72F. See
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/csur/shavian.html or
http://www.indigo.ie/egt/standards/csur/shavian.html for the mapping of
Unicode code points to Shavian letters. Note that, to my knowledge, no
Unicode-aware program implements this mapping yet -- especially since CSUR
is offical and AFAIK not related to the Unicode Consortium.
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