medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Terrill wrote in part:
<< ... there is no numerical code for ? on a Macintosh, as the ?
is typed right from the keyboard. Option + Shift
+ 2 = ? All this assumes that one is using a
font that includes the ?, such as Times New
Roman. >>
With apologies for the tangential nature of this
post, I thought I would take this opportunity to
note (and perhaps illustrate) the following
section of the introductory message for this
list, conveniently available here:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/files/MEDIEVAL-RELIGION/INTRODUCTION.TXT
"It is recommended to send the text of your message as plain text without
special formatting and without special characters, to make sure that it can be
decoded correctly by the many different e-mail systems used by the several
hundred members of this list."
On my Macintosh, even using a screen font in
Eudora which includes the euro sign (sample: ¤),
the sign was correctly rendered in the subject
header of Terrill's message but in the body was
converted to a question mark. Even more common
precomposed diacritical-letter combinations which
one might reasonably expect to come through
correctly (French vowels aigu and grave, for
example, and German vowels with umlauts) can't be
counted on. Any symbols among the first 128
listed here:
http://www.wiktel.com/standards/ascii.htm
that is, lower or 7-bit ASCII, are fair game, but
everything else should be considered among the
"special characters" of the intro message and may
or may not display properly when sent
electronically.
In my experience of a number of years on lists in
which people have used upper ASCII symbols, a
large proportion of the time they do in fact work
correctly for the majority of recipients, and
even when they don't it's usually not difficult
to determine from the context what they should
have been. However, use of a system like that of
the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/review.html
will ensure that your message will be easily read by all recipients.
John
--
*** John McChesney-Young ** [log in to unmask]
** Berkeley, California, U.S.A. ***
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