Re: Changing the default charset for composing messages

From: Tassos Golnas (tgNO_at_SPAMparalia.com)
Date: 05/27/04 

Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 15:33:44 -0500

On 04/05/27 1:08 PM, in article BCDB7CC4.65FA1%berkowit@spoof_silcom.com,
"Paul Berkowitz" <berkowit@spoof_silcom.com> wrote:

> On 5/26/04 1:36 PM, in article BCDA6A0F.160F%tgNO@SPAMparalia.com, "Tassos
> Golnas" <tgNO@SPAMparalia.com> wrote:
>
>> On 04/05/25 11:52 PM, in article BCD9E11A.170D2%barry@mvps.org.INVALID,
>> "Barry Wainwright" <barry@mvps.org.INVALID> wrote:
>>
>>> On 25/5/04 10:47 pm, in article BCD92923.14A2%tgNO@SPAMparalia.com, "Tassos
>>> Golnas" <tgNO@SPAMparalia.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> Among the users in countries with non-western European alphabets, there is
>>>> a
>>>> definite need to be able to set the default character set of the new
>>>> messages to the correct value for their language.
>>>>
>>>
>>> In the preferences, under 'Mail & News/Read', set the default language for
>>> unlabelled messages.
>>
>> Well, that takes care of the RECEIVED mail and news. However, I was talking
>> about the new (composed) messages, and there is no way to set a default
>> charset for that.
>>
> I don't think there's any way of setting that. The default will be the
> correct default for the localized version of Entourage you're using. For
> 2004 only US version is currently out, but within weeks there will be
> Japanese, French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Italian and maybe one or two
> I've forgotten. They should each have the correct default.
>
> However, once you start typing and then Send, Entourage will choose an
> appropriate character set. Probably Entourage will usually choose Unicode
> UTF-8 if your message contains characters from more than one character set.
> (If I remember correctly, it usually alerts you that it needs to do so. At
> least in X it does so.) Most email readers nowadays, especially all
> Microsoft email apps since Outlook 97, can read Unicode. In other cases it
> will just choose the correct charset on the basis of the characters you've
> typed. (That certainly happens for Chinese an Japanese.) I would have
> thought it would do so for Central European too, for example, but perhaps
> the fact that the message will inevitably include lots of regular Latin
> characters may make it prefer UTF-8.
>
> What happens if you don't choose a charset and just type using the language
> you ant form the OS's Input (flag) menu? After you send the message, go to
> Sent Items, select the message and View/Source. What doe the charset header
> say? Is it the wrong charset for your purposes?

This is what I have been doing in my attempts to figure out Entourage's
behavior (always talking about E-2004). Occasionally I have to write in
Greek (????????), using the Unicode character palette that OS X provides for
the language and one of the fonts that contain Greek glyphs in the right
places (like Lucida Grande or Verdana for example).

I wish I could make Entourage always default to UTF-8, or at least choose
UTF-8 when it detects multiple charsets. However, all I get is a 7bit,
Windows-1254 encoded email. It doesn't even matter if I use HTML formatting
or not. For reference, the MS encoding "standard" for Greek is
Windows-1253, differing in a couple of places from the ISO-8859-7 standard.

Don't get me wrong, it works correctly if I set it manually, but it would be
really useful to be able to default on UTF-8, especially if you are an
office:mac user in Greece, I would imagine :)

Tassos

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