Hi Kelly>
You wrote:
> Dear Jacob,
>
> This question is asked occasionally on the list. Here's a highly
> informed response offered to this question in 1998.
>
> Kelly
>
>
>
> From [log in to unmask] Jun 30 06:47:40 1998
> Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 06:46:11 -0400
> From: Saul J Rosenberg <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply to: Saul J Rosenberg <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: =20 and international text
<stuff deleted>
Wow, Kelly, you're even more of a pack rat than me. <chuckle>
That's great! I've been looking for an explanation like that for years.
Thanks.
Cheers!
Tom
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kelly Pierce" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 5:30 PM
Subject: Re: Question About Message Format
> From: "Jacob Joehl" <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 11:24 AM
>
>
> > Hi all. I am wondering what the =20 symbols in several messages on
> this
> > list are. Thank you.
>
> Dear Jacob,
>
> This question is asked occasionally on the list. Here's a highly
> informed response offered to this question in 1998.
>
> Kelly
>
>
>
> From [log in to unmask] Jun 30 06:47:40 1998
> Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 06:46:11 -0400
> From: Saul J Rosenberg <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply to: Saul J Rosenberg <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: =20 and international text
>
> Its an interesting question.
>
> The equals codes support an early try at the internationalization of
> global email systems. That they show up in your email reader is a
> result of uneven software support.
>
> The =20 at the end of some paragraphs represents a space character,
> or a paragraph end character, and can be ignored. It is an artifact
> of whatever system is used to generate the text. Other "=##"
> characters often appear for characters that are not in "7 bit Ascii"
> such as true quote marks, or letters from European languages that are
> not in English, or letters combined with diacritical marks (such as
> an e with accent grave).
>
> Another common use is a single equals sign at the end of lines,
> not followed by any digits. This represents an optional inserted line
> wrap, when the original author typed a long paragraph as a single
> continuous line, and the email system inserted temporary line
> breaks every perhaps 60-70 characters as a kindness so that mere
> mortals could read the text.
>
> ---------------------
>
> What follows is a deeper explanation for the technically inclined ...
>
> The equals codes pass special characters transparently thru the global
> email system, without them being mangled. Without these codes, a
> person at a Spanish computer may enter a "c-cedilla", but it might
> show up on a system from a different country as a different character,
> or be deleted as an invalid code, or worse, happen to match an internal
> software flag byte and totally screw up the rest of the message.
>
> Since the equals codes represent these foreign characters using
> vanilla 7 bit Ascii (equals plus digits), they pass as-is thru
> all email systems. In theory, your email reader, knowing the original
> language's character set, should reassemble them on your end to
> the desired character. That many email readers don't do this
> speaks to the many varieties of email systems out there, and the
> many different character set representations for the many languages
> and dialects.
>
> The base problem is technical -- most current systems use one byte
> (8 bits) to hold one character. 8 bits can represent 256 symbols.
> But there are more than 256 characters and variations necessary,
> so there is a perpetual squabble because no one standard can fit all.
> And even if they managed to squeeze in the major European languages,
> there is still the rest of the world (remember them ?)
>
> There is a new technical solution that is taking hold.
> The latest character representation, called UniCode, uses two bytes
> (16 bits) per character, which can hold 65536 symbols.
> That is ample to cover not only Europe, but most of the world,
> even including Chinese / Japanese / Korean and other oriental
> languages which have thousands of symbols.
> (To some people's regret, they turned down Klingon :-)
>
> Using 16 bits rather than 8 doubles the (uncompressed) storage
> requirements. However, computer systems and disks are growing more
> powerful and larger very quickly, so more systems are expected to
> support UniCode over time, for true international text support.
> (a motivation to give up on DOS)
>
> Unicode will both make it easier and harder for screen readers
> used for international text.
>
> Easier because there is one unique character for every symbol.
> The screen reader does not have to guess based on which language /
> dialect it thinks is the default for that message.
>
> Harder, because there are 30,000 plus symbols for the full Unicode
> support. (English centric non-Politically Correct remark -- most
> of these are not used for English / European letters, so our
> transition will be easy.)
>
> Simple questions often have interesting answers. Hoped this helped.
>
> Regards
> Saul
>
> -------------------
>
> > From: Ted Martin <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 16:55:25 +0100
> > Subject: =20
>
> > Could somebody please explain to a novice, and a newcomer to this
> > list, why =20 appears at the end of every paragraph in articles
> > taken from journals such as the New York Times?
>
> > Just curious.
> > --
> > Ted Martin
>
> Saul J Rosenberg [log in to unmask]
> Object Developers Group, Inc (ODG) http://www.objdev.org
>
>
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