Character change in received emails

[Lizzie]

My Eudora 7.1 gets emails from someone using Windows Live Mail in which a
single apostrophe in the text is replaced by these 3 characters: ’

(In case that looks wrong, the characters are: letter "a" with a
circumflex, Euro currency sign, TM in upper script.)

How can I avoid this?

[John H Meyers]

Post by Lizzie
My Eudora 7.1 gets emails from someone using Windows Live Mail in which a
single apostrophe in the text is replaced by these 3 characters: ’
(In case that looks wrong, the characters are: letter "a" with a
circumflex, Euro currency sign, TM in upper script.)
How can I avoid this?

The character in question is _not_ "an apostrophe"

That is to say, it is not this character between brackets [']
which is an "ascii" (7-bit) common keyboard character
used for both opening and closing single quotes
and as an apostrophe in plain 7-bit text.

It is instead a sequence of three bytes representing
a "curly quote" or "curly apostrophe" in UTF-8,
which is a variable-length-per-character
universal character encoding scheme for all languages
that Eudora was never programmed to deal with.

Leo Notenboom has a well-written explanation about UTF-8:
<http://ask-leo.com/why_do_i_get_odd_characters_instead_of_quotes_in_my_documents.html>

Two approaches have been taken by writers of external plugins for Eudora,
designed to help Eudora to display incoming UTF-8 encoded messages:

UTF8ISO -- this plugin substitutes an 8-bit character from an ISO-8859-x
character set for each original UTF-8 multi-byte sequence. For example,
it replaces each 3-byte UTF-8 "curly apostrophe" with an "ascii apostrophe,"
to give a close-enough approximation to display many Western European languages,
although it would be impossible to handle Chinese in this way, for example,
because Chinese has far more than 256 possible "characters."

"Greek Viewer" by Brana Bujenovic -- this plugin opens messages in separate
windows that are positioned right over Eudora's windows, and appears to
fill those windows using web browser display modules, which then allow you
to choose different character encodings (including UTF-8) to display the
true original content, even if it happens to be Chinese, for example.

UTF8ISO is known to have problematic bugs, particularly with original messages
which have had "base64" encoding applied after UTF-8 encoding, sometimes
completely mangling original messages which could have been read well enough
even if occasional "curly quotes" had not been transformed for you.

The "Greek Viewer," on the other hand, seems not to have those problems,
and of course also displays the true characters of all languages,
rather than a few limited ISO 8-bit character substitutions,
provided that your computer has the resources (fonts, etc.) to do that.

Additional references and sources:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8>
<http://windharp.de/software/utf8iso.htm>
<http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/plugins.htm>
<http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/viewer.zip>

--

[Lizzie]

Post by John H Meyers

Post by Lizzie
My Eudora 7.1 gets emails from someone using Windows Live Mail in
which a single apostrophe in the text is replaced by these 3
characters: ’
(In case that looks wrong, the characters are: letter "a" with a
circumflex, Euro currency sign, TM in upper script.)
How can I avoid this?

The character in question is _not_ "an apostrophe"
That is to say, it is not this character between brackets [']
which is an "ascii" (7-bit) common keyboard character
used for both opening and closing single quotes
and as an apostrophe in plain 7-bit text.
It is instead a sequence of three bytes representing
a "curly quote" or "curly apostrophe" in UTF-8,
which is a variable-length-per-character
universal character encoding scheme for all languages
that Eudora was never programmed to deal with.
<http://ask-
leo.com/why_do_i_get_odd_characters_instead_of_quotes_in_my
_documents.html>
Two approaches have been taken by writers of external plugins for
Eudora, designed to help Eudora to display incoming UTF-8 encoded
UTF8ISO -- this plugin substitutes an 8-bit character from an
ISO-8859-x character set for each original UTF-8 multi-byte sequence.
For example, it replaces each 3-byte UTF-8 "curly apostrophe" with an
"ascii apostrophe," to give a close-enough approximation to display
many Western European languages, although it would be impossible to
handle Chinese in this way, for example, because Chinese has far more
than 256 possible "characters."
"Greek Viewer" by Brana Bujenovic -- this plugin opens messages in
separate windows that are positioned right over Eudora's windows, and
appears to fill those windows using web browser display modules, which
then allow you to choose different character encodings (including
UTF-8) to display the true original content, even if it happens to be
Chinese, for example.
UTF8ISO is known to have problematic bugs, particularly with original
messages which have had "base64" encoding applied after UTF-8
encoding, sometimes completely mangling original messages which could
have been read well enough even if occasional "curly quotes" had not
been transformed for you.
The "Greek Viewer," on the other hand, seems not to have those
problems, and of course also displays the true characters of all
languages, rather than a few limited ISO 8-bit character
substitutions, provided that your computer has the resources (fonts,
etc.) to do that.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8>
<http://windharp.de/software/utf8iso.htm>
<http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/plugins.htm>
<http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/viewer.zip>

That's really great info. Thank you very much.

I installed UTF8ISO and will now wait for another email from the same
person. I can't check the plugin is workingbecause I manually edited all
the munged characters in the previous email into a more readable form.

[John H Meyers]

Post by Lizzie
I installed UTF8ISO

That's why I failed in the advertising business --
I'd get behind the best possible product,
and everyone would buy the second rate one instead :(

Hope it works for you.

--

[[e-mail]]

Post by John H Meyers

Post by Lizzie
My Eudora 7.1 gets emails from someone using Windows Live Mail in which a
single apostrophe in the text is replaced by these 3 characters: ’
(In case that looks wrong, the characters are: letter "a" with a
circumflex, Euro currency sign, TM in upper script.)
How can I avoid this?

The character in question is _not_ "an apostrophe"
That is to say, it is not this character between brackets [']
which is an "ascii" (7-bit) common keyboard character
used for both opening and closing single quotes
and as an apostrophe in plain 7-bit text.
It is instead a sequence of three bytes representing
a "curly quote" or "curly apostrophe" in UTF-8,
which is a variable-length-per-character
universal character encoding scheme for all languages
that Eudora was never programmed to deal with.
<http://ask-leo.com/why_do_i_get_odd_characters_instead_of_quotes_in_my_documents.html>
Two approaches have been taken by writers of external plugins for Eudora,
UTF8ISO -- this plugin substitutes an 8-bit character from an ISO-8859-x
character set for each original UTF-8 multi-byte sequence. For example,
it replaces each 3-byte UTF-8 "curly apostrophe" with an "ascii apostrophe,"
to give a close-enough approximation to display many Western European languages,
although it would be impossible to handle Chinese in this way, for example,
because Chinese has far more than 256 possible "characters."
"Greek Viewer" by Brana Bujenovic -- this plugin opens messages in separate
windows that are positioned right over Eudora's windows, and appears to
fill those windows using web browser display modules, which then allow you
to choose different character encodings (including UTF-8) to display the
true original content, even if it happens to be Chinese, for example.
UTF8ISO is known to have problematic bugs, particularly with original messages
which have had "base64" encoding applied after UTF-8 encoding, sometimes
completely mangling original messages which could have been read well enough
even if occasional "curly quotes" had not been transformed for you.
The "Greek Viewer," on the other hand, seems not to have those problems,
and of course also displays the true characters of all languages,
rather than a few limited ISO 8-bit character substitutions,
provided that your computer has the resources (fonts, etc.) to do that.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8>
<http://windharp.de/software/utf8iso.htm>
<http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/plugins.htm>
<http://www.drivehq.com/web/brana/viewer.zip>

So, is this still the current and best solution? I'm working with real estate agents in Puerto Rico and they use a lot of accented characters. This is making it very hard to respond to without the emails being totally borked up. I'm also seeing  periodically in the emails, which I think is a result of a UTF-8 end of line marker, according to another post I read. Will that also be fixed by using the Greek viewer?

[geo]

Post by ***@gmail.com
So, is this still the current and best solution?

Take a look at https://github.com/LenShustek/Eudora_fix_mbx
The standalone program does a very good job of fixing all sorts of fancy formatting junk. There is also a patch of the Eudora executable that fixes some bugs. These are what I use.

[Bob Fulks]

I just installed the "Greek Viewer" and tested it on several such messages and it works great.

This problem was the main reason why I have been looking for another email client program. Now I should be able to stick with Eudora 7.1, the best one I have ever found... Too bad someone doesn't update and support that program.

Thanks.

[Tim Streater]

Post by Bob Fulks
I just installed the "Greek Viewer" and tested it on several such messages
and it works great.
This problem was the main reason why I have been looking for another email
client program. Now I should be able to stick with Eudora 7.1, the best one I
have ever found... Too bad someone doesn't update and support that program.

Who do you think might update it?