autochange of signs

[Georg Emberger]

Thank your for answering, 

I decidet nothing to change. It is simply so, that you find sometimes in www 
text who is not correct encodet... 

I thought to make letters, text ect. preserved for eternitys it would be 
usefull to take a basic code.

Georg


Am Freitag, 13. April 2007 schrieb Werner Koch:
> On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:40, georg.emberger at gmx.at said:
> > I have a question - if I am writing an eMail in KMail and I want to
> > change some signs automatically (germans have their strange "Umlaute"
> > like Ä Ö Ü... they should be changed to some international AE OE or UE) -
> > how I can manage
>
> You should never do that!
>
> The times of plain 7 bit ASCII are loooooong ago.  For about two decades
> transparent 8 bit encoding has been implemented nearly everywhere.  The
> encoding used is Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) and sufficient for all Western
> Europe languages.  MIME is also pretty old and defines standard ways of
> encoding all kinds of encodings.  The most common case is
> quoted-printable encoding and all MUAs today handle this really well.
>
> In fact since a few years the UTF-8 encoding is gaining more and more
> acceptance and all modern mailers use this as default.  UTF-8 is the
> clean way of encoding all character sets as it is a way of encoding
> Unicode - UTF-8 is upward compatible to plain old ASCI (ISO-646).
> Remember that there are only a few hundred million people who can get
> around with ASCII; but some billions need to use a more complex
> characters set.
>
> If you still want to butcher our Umlauts, you may run sed over the
> text. Something like:
>
>    sed 's/ä/ae/g; s/ö/oe/g; s/ü/ue/g'
>
> Gnus has a way to run external commands like sed over its message
> buffer; I guess Kmail has such a feature too.
>
>
> Salam-Shalom,
>
>    Werner