From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Russ Allbery To: Bernard Dautrevaux Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: Re: Compiler for Red Hat Linux 8 Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 03:12:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <17B78BDF120BD411B70100500422FC6309E2ED@IIS000> X-SW-Source: 2001-07/msg01340.html Bernard Dautrevaux writes: > Looking at the headers you'll see that you send only us-ascii (a quite > old subset of iso-8859) while a lot of people use the *standard* iso > charset, where 0x91 is "opening single quote", 0x92 closing, 0x93 > "opening double quote" and 0x94 closing. No, they're not. ISO 8859-1 doesn't assign any code points between 0x7F and 0xA0. 0x91 through 0x94 are assigned that meaning in Windows Code Page 1252, which is not a standard of any type whatsoever. Those characters are used for Windows "smart quotes", and will be unreadable to anyone not using Windows unless their software specifically caters to mislabelled character sets or the message is correctly labelled and there is a CP-1252 font available. Messages using those characters should be properly tagged with charset=windows-1252 or they're in violation of the MIME standard. Most software on Microsoft platforms does not correctly label this character set and produces broken messages like the one that started this sub-thread (which was labelled as ISO 8859-1, despite the fact that it didn't use that character set). I'm sure the original author was completely unaware that this was happening; most Microsoft software makes it extremely easy to make this mistake and apparently doesn't care about producing readable messages on non-Microsoft platforms. Usually turning off Smart Quotes will fix the problem. < http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/iso8859/iso8859-pointers.html#unass > has additional details on why those code points are intentionally unassigned in ISO 8859-1 (on 7-bit systems, they could be interpreted as control codes when the eighth bit was stripped, producing serious problems -- this was a significant issue at the time that ISO 8859-1 was standardized). -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) < http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ >