Eudora 7.0 and utf-8

[Hank Nussbacher]

I looked thru the Whats New of 7.0 and I downloaded the manual but cannot find
any reference to Eudora handling of utf-8 encoding. I have looked thru their
knowledge base as well.

I know of the plugin at:
http://windharp.de/software/utf8iso.htm
but it seems ridiculous that everyone who has to deal with non-English emails
with utf8 encoding has to get a non-supported plugin.

I can only assume that Eudora doesn't care about anything but English and
never will.

Oh well.

Regards,
Hank

[Palle Jensen]

Post by Hank Nussbacher
I looked thru the Whats New of 7.0 and I downloaded
the manual but cannot find any reference to Eudora
handling of utf-8 encoding. I have looked thru their
knowledge base as well.
http://windharp.de/software/utf8iso.htm
but it seems ridiculous that everyone who has to deal
with non-English emails with utf8 encoding has to get a
non-supported plugin.
I can only assume that Eudora doesn't care about anything
but English and never will.

You are perfectly right.

Look at this thread:
http://eudorabb.qualcomm.com/showthread.php?t=3227

I feel like I've been hammering my fist into the floor crying out
loud for I don't know how long. Been sending in sugestions to
Qualcomm and have never heard anything about the UTF issue
from Qualcomm.

I've been very happy with Eudora for many years but this has
been the drop that has made me leave. I still keep on looking
into this forum and on the website hoping that they will implement
UTF support, but it seems to be meaningless.

I've converted to Thunderbird. Actualy I'm satisfied with it but I
still think it's a shame that such a basic feature is not supported.

My conclusion is, that Eudora has stopped evolving.

And yes, I have also tried the plugin, but it does not work well.

[Katrina Knight]

Post by Hank Nussbacher
I looked thru the Whats New of 7.0 and I downloaded the manual but cannot find
any reference to Eudora handling of utf-8 encoding.

You dind't find anything because there isn't anything to find.

Post by Hank Nussbacher
http://windharp.de/software/utf8iso.htm
but it seems ridiculous that everyone who has to deal with non-English emails
with utf8 encoding has to get a non-supported plugin.

Using a third-party plugin isn't really that big of a deal as long as the
person who wrote it did a good job. (I can't comment on the quality of
that particular plugin.)

Post by Hank Nussbacher
I can only assume that Eudora doesn't care about anything but English and
never will.

Supporting unicode, which is what needs to happen here, is not a simple
thing to retrofit a program to do. Apparently the people in charge don't
think it is a high priority, but I suspect they care to some extent. That
doesn't necessarily mean they aren't working on it. Steve Dorner
(Eudora's inventor) made some comments here a couple years ago about
adding support for additional languages but I haven't heard any more on
that subject since. From what I remember of what he said, the gist of it
was that they'd probably add support for Japanese first, since there is
actually a Japanese version of Eudora in existence, and work out from
there. I certainly wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen, but I
also wouldn't assume it is never going to happen. Personally, I think they
ought to make it a much higher priority, but the people in charge often
prefer to give priority to things that can be done quickly and easily.

[Hank Nussbacher]

Post by Katrina Knight
Supporting unicode, which is what needs to happen here, is not a simple
thing to retrofit a program to do. Apparently the people in charge don't
think it is a high priority, but I suspect they care to some extent. That
doesn't necessarily mean they aren't working on it. Steve Dorner
(Eudora's inventor) made some comments here a couple years ago about
adding support for additional languages but I haven't heard any more on
that subject since. From what I remember of what he said, the gist of it

I understand the work involved, but the request for Unicode (international
standard), has been made many years ago, not within the past year. I know I
have requested it as of v5.1. Others probably asked for it before that as
well. It didn't appear in v6 and now it hasn't appeared in v7.

So lets not make excuses for Eudora. They have had years to implement it, but
chose not to. You draw your own implications.

-Hank

[Katrina Knight]

Post by Hank Nussbacher
I understand the work involved, but the request for Unicode (international
standard), has been made many years ago, not within the past year. I know I
have requested it as of v5.1. Others probably asked for it before that as
well. It didn't appear in v6 and now it hasn't appeared in v7.
So lets not make excuses for Eudora. They have had years to implement it, but
chose not to. You draw your own implications.

I'm certainly not making any excuses for anyone here. I think not doing it
is rather stupid. What I'm saying is that we have no idea of what's going
on behind the scenes. It could be 90% done for all we know, because
they're not going to show it to us until it is pretty close to being
finished. Or it could be that they started working on it, decided that
what they were doing was not going to work and threw it all away or
that they just intended to do something and never got to do it. I'm fairly
sure from what was said before that the developers wanted to do it.
Developers wanting to do it and developers being allowed to do it by the
people who pay them are different things unfortunately. :(

I think anyone who really needs unicode support should probably be using a
different program at this point, if the utf-8 plug-in doesn't satisfy
their needs, because I don't think holding your breathe waiting for Eudora
to support it is a good idea.