[Coco] Unicode and MIME (was: Updated accurate memory map)

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/10/04 2:35:54 PM Eastern Daylight Time, james at skwirl.ca 
writes:

> Actually, for ASCII characters, it uses 8 bits. For any Unicode 
>  character that needs more than that, a code is used to initiate an 
>  extended sequence (in this case, the a-circumflex) and other bytes 
>  follow. I believe there are Unicode characters that require more than 
>  two bytes.

Well, that would explain getting three characters in place of one.

>  I know there's a setting in mine. It's the Text Encoding, which might 
>  be set to be ISO Latin. It's usually the default.

Which control panel item would that be under?  Should I leave it at ISO 
Latin, or change it?
 
>  If you see MIME separators and the like, the mailer hasn't processed 
>  them. I usually only see this in SPAM.

OK.  I suspect that such mail has been thru an intermediate site that 
stripped or munged some of the header lines that would have alerted my email reader 
to process it right.  I see MIME statements in lots of legit mail.

Oddly, about the only email with HTML in it that gets recognized as such and 
properly handled, is SPAM!  The commercial sources know how to code HTML 
correctly.  You get colored backgrounds, formatting, all sorts of stuff, but only 
in SPAM.  Real people haven't figured out how to send HTML correctly yet :-)
 
>  It's not the keyboard, it's the software. In some text editing 
>  software, and I guess emailers, doing a " after a space will give you 
>  the right quote, and after other characters, the left quote. Same with 
>  the apostrophe. I hated it when Word used to do that to me... Mac Word 
>  Version 5 (long time ago) did it, and I turned it off as soon as I  
figured out how.

So that's it -- after space is LEFT, else RIGHT.  That explains a lot of the 
"effects" that I see.   So there is a way to turn it off in Word -- good, that 
means I can holler at people to hunt down this option and kill it.  Good for 
serious typesetting, bad for email.

>  I had always wondered why ` was used... :) now I know. :)

Yep.  Only place I've ever seen it is in UNIX/Linux shell scripts.  You 
enclose a command expression in back-ticks (yes, the Right end is also a 
back-tick), to mean that expression should be executed and its (string) result 
substituted in the larger expression where the back-quoted expression occurred.
 
Thanks for the clarifications -- Mike K.