Subject: No Charsets, ie no national alphabets eg German with Umlauts From: No_National_Charsets@ I append http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/std/no_chars.txt See Also http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/std/no_html_format.txt http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/std/no_mail_formats.txt http://mailman.berklix.org/mailman/listinfo http://www.berklix.org/berklix/lists/ Please learn how to configure your mailer to send Plain Text. Thanks In reply to your query to my standard .signature block containing: > Format: Plain text. Not HTML, multipart/alternative, base64, quoted-printable. Why I deter non Ascii, non plain text, character (alphabet) sets: Character Sets [A-Z + punctuation]: I try to reduce too much mail received in unwanted junk national formats from people {on the various lists I run via majordomo@berklix.org http://www.berklix.org/help} + clubs I help run at http://www.berklix.org/ & from many other lists I'm on; Some emanating from misconfigured mailer software & clueless people, both business & social etc, who send me lots of broken &/or inconsistent German umlauts (used to be in 3 different single byte standards since 1985 onward (Ref. "GERMAN UMLAUT CHARACTER TABLE" in http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/standards/umlauts.rof ) (ie a long time before MIME supposedly (but did not) resolve problems)). I'm tired after a quarter century of receiving central European & other junk accents, weird characters & glyphs etc that go wrong & waste my time, tired of trying to figure what went wrong usually their end ( occasionally my end), & how I should make my end ever more complex to display, compensate for & generate junk national char sets I don't want or need (eg there's an Ascii equivalent for Umlauts anyway). Latin font set was good enough for Roman masons chiselling a monument 2000 years back. The character set (with addition of 'W' [etc?] remains sufficient for modern Italians, British, Americans, Australians, & rest of English speaking world, & some other European countries too (eg Holland etc?). But not for some languages that retain their medieval alphabet variant extensions. (eg German, French, Spanish, Swedish. ) I've no desire to have more time wasted, to receive, generate, or debug all the software & broken configs of senders of unwanted accents, weird chars, glyphs, ligatures. Especially as most senders are clueless, & incompetent, & can't even understand what `configuring a mailer' means. Many (not all) European countries use their own alphabet extension junk they think essential, yet usually the next adjacent country has different junk, & neither knows how to read/ pronounce/ generate/ print the other country's 'not so essential after all' ;-) ... Junk. What we're doing with new extra email & printing technologies to support national font sets, is really letting some medieval anchored, parochial European countries sink further Backward into their own national holes, evolved in the dark ages after the Romans left & international communication decayed centuries ago. Now in the name of internationalism, we pander to local weirdness, & encourage more parochial hindrances to communication, making us Less able to communicate with other countries now than a few decades back, when people had evolved & were using standard means to represent their local alphabet extras in standard Ascii, that others beyond their border could also read. (See the example of Ascii representation of German Umlauts) German: The Germans made a good start, having standard sequences of AE OE UE as replacements for their Umlauts (2 dots above) & 'sharf ess'. It was often not used though, & they had 3 different single byte standards. Most Germans that used single byte umlauts were clueless on the variant formats, ( I built a table to try to document to them, what their compatriots were using. ) (Ref. "GERMAN UMLAUT CHARACTER TABLE" in http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/standards/umlauts.rof ) Later MIME & HTML etc standards evolved for umlauts & sharf ess, ... then ... The Germans officially consigned their Shar Ess to oblivion by their Rechts Schreib Reform (1 or 2 ?) ... then they kept on using it! Now the umlauts will stay for ever to plague us, if the AE OE UE conventions are less needed & less used, 'cos of the pandering to local national alphabets. The people providing National extensions are thus long term Impeding international communication. Why To Avoid Wasting Time On German Umlauts (Insert To Later Shorten, Sort & Move) {------------- I forwarded mail as "text/plain, 7bit, us-ascii" My usual, unless I append jpg/pdf in base64. I never assert mail as German or anything else as I often write a mix. I avoid writing own text in German mail with 8 bit umlauts or UTF umlauts whatever, I stick to infallible portable AE, OE, UE, SS. I don't care about umlauts, to me they're time wasting junk if the original authordoes not write them portably as AE OE UE SS. My environment & mail setting have no German set, (nor English nor American as far as I know). I often generate multi lingual sections of English, German & occasionally bits of French, so I don't assert any language[s]. Internationalisation Schmarn seems predicated for: - Local national non English based users wanting one language above others, with recipients in same language, probably writing in just one language, not producing mixed language texts. - People who feel it worthwhile investing their free time, or are paid to support others, to send their local national extensions to other local nationals; extensions to the common Latin character set, not used by Romans, not used beyond national borders, not loved, understood or valued beyond. - Stuff I have no interest in, or time for. I really dislike umlauts: 30+ years of wasted time since 1985, first the 3 alternate representations in the old days + also since on one modern representation, I mourn the reducing portable usage of AE OE UE SS. German Rechts schreib reform [2?] killed Sharf Ess in theory in Germany (but not Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg) a pity they didn't kill Umlauts too. Many tools at 2019-07-29 like FreeBSD fmt ( http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/src/bsd/fixes/FreeBSD/src/gen/usr.bin/fmt/ ) & /usr/ports/textproc/mgdiff still freak on 8 bit umlauts, so one can't edit an English text with chunks of German in, without converting umlauts to AE OE UE SS. I have my own macros to generate umlauts from my own .rof masters to .html & .pdf & .txt etc backends for important letters I create, http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/standards/umlauts.rof http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/bin/.other/umlauts.sed.ascii http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/bin/.other/umlauts.sed.groff http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/src/bsd/fixes/FreeBSD/src/jhs/share/mk/berklix2.mk but for casual email, other people's non portable umlauts waste my time, so I don't care if their im-portably written umlauts get corrupted on forwarding. If whoever I'm forwarding To cares enough about the German topic I am forwarding, they should join whichever list I am forwardinf From, & read the on line archive. I have no time to waste format converting or protecting im-portably written junk Umlauts. (Even worse than umlauts is/was the Swedish O with a vertical line through. In 1985 they mapped to the Unix pipe symbol. Menu scripts with embedded text including those delayed me translating the Sinix OS to Swedish, (fortunately German with 7bit umlauts AE OE UE SS was no problem). I used to have a badge for conferences: '& 0x7f' It spoke volumes to the Umlaut afflicted as well as Kermit & similar users ;-) I have no time to waste protecting annoying umlauts that are not written portably as AE OE UE SS. (Local is not always best: eg though I'm English, I prefer American not English or German keyboards: USA layout is BIOS boot compliant with < | > etc, read to debug boot hangs.) -------------} Swedish: In 1985 I battled to fix loads of broken Unix/Sinix shell scripts, 'cos translators failed to en-quote loads of Swedish '0' with a vertical line through, which became pipe symbols breaking scripts. French Spanish & the rest. More weird accents etc. The Italians don't need the mess, neither does international English, neither did the Romans need it, why burden ourselves with medieval national weirdness no one beyond borders knows how to read print or pronounce ? Back in 1985/86 at a computer manufacturers, where I was porting the OS to lots of human languages, there was serious debate about which of various alphabetic sort orders we should have for German Umlauts. Eye glazing. I escaped from that one ;-) Turkish Modernisation: Attaturk had a good idea: Abandon a baroque old alphabet & try to standardise on a common European/Roman alphabet. More international, less nationally limiting. A pity more Europeans don't adopt the same approach: strip the baroque & standardise on modern Latin/Ascii - what the Romans used (+ 'W' [etc]) !. For the nasty remnant characters, adopt the useful German style conventions of mapping them to Latin sequences such as Ae Oe Ue & SS etc. Just because we Can do something doesn't mean we Should: Weird national alphabet variants are supported by ever more tools & complexity, - For who ? - For a user base of most lazy nationals, least interested in using an internationally legible Ascii Roman alphabet. My escape sequences from groff.rof to Ascii & HTML etc: http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/standards/umlauts.rof As if European weirdness wasn't bad enough ... we now have non Latin domain names, - useless for international Internet users, but supported by domain registrars for local languages - twice as many domain names to sell: local font names, & international Latin font names) An Aside: Keyboards - another associated pain: German: There are 4 different layouts of keyboards ! (Not Just 2, as most Germans think, Ask staff at http://www.epo.org for explanation of eg Swiss German). Not just DIN & ISO. Not just Y & Z swapping, but loads of punctuation moves. French: Different again. British: Even British don't conform to international American computer industry keyboard startup layout. (I suspect we did when Brits used American computer gear, but since PC's it's all gone back to simulating the variance between American & British typewrite keyboard layouts, that have varied for a century or so). Some punctuation keys move: A pain when the computer is in BIOS, American, or when a Unix box needs debugging & vital punctuation chars ie < | > ' etc are mis-mapped, non conformant to USA Bios es, & needing key scan mapping in both 80x24 and X11/xmodmap. Russian: They even move their 0-9 keys one to left or right, (makes it impossible to use a scheme like typing international phone codes +1 +7 +44 +49 to select American Russian British German layouts - so we had to use a mouse to select a keyboard). Laptops with Black key caps & white paint, labelled in German are worse, labelled in English are still bad, both incorrect while a machine is booting initially to American defaults. Some Think There's No Problems: End users often don't realise there's issues, They're lucky. Only a few of the dumbest obtusely deny there can be no problem, just because "It works for me!" which doesn't prove there's not a mess of mappings they are reliant on the system pre-configuring; It just shows they remain wilfully ignorant. I see problems because I run mail lists for a thousand people, on many mail lists http://www.berklix.org http://www.berklix.org/help/ most technically clueless, most Microsoft users, many on wrongly configured mailers, many configured to German defaults even if user is not German. I also see problems others don't because as a systems engineer & programmer http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/cv/ I develop, debug & config software & hardware before it's up & running properly, so I have to debug & fix the mess, usually with a wrongly labelled keyboard. Summary: If you don't mail me in international Ascii plain text, ie If you mail me in unwanted national alphabets &/or HTML etc, it may be automatically filtered as junk, & deleted unseen as spam. Customers can mail me in whatever character set & format they like (& I'll set up bypass filters to avoid anti spam measures) but only After they've arranged to pay for computer consultancy. http://www.berklix.com http://bsdpie.eu Please learn to configure your mailer & send Plain Text. Thanks http://www.berklix.com Computer Consultancy http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/cv/ My Resume - English & German http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/contact/ Contact - German for business also OK. http://www.berklix.com/free/ Free Software http://www.berklix.org Free Organisations & Clubs