Re: Cross-platform e-mail text size problems

Kadin2048 wrote:
On 2008-07-01, AV3 <arvimide@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

...
You can write whatever you want in TextEdit, but you have to save it as "rich text," .rtf-formatted, to preserve the more exotic diacritics, apparently even today as it was in OS 10.1.

Humm. Can you give an example of some of the diacritics that aren't
preserved? I just did a test using all of the diacritics that I could
think of [1], saved it as plain text UTF-8, and then re-opened it.
Everything was just fine, as long as I specified when opening the file
(in the "Open" dialog) that it was UTF-8. I can't imagine anything
that you can represent in RTF that you can't represent in UTF-8 (in
terms of glyphs/symbols, not formatting, obviously).



You are right. Formatting in plain text utf-8 is now possible. Although my habit of using rich text formatting since OS 10.1 has not changed, Mac allows .txt-formatted, plain text, utf-8, so my adherence to rich text is (no longer) necessary. In internet communication, I still see garbled text when different OS text is mistakenly formatted in ISO-8859-1, so my utf-8 formatting is apparently up-to-date plain text, rich text no longer being the default format for utf.


Apparently, TextEdit doesn't do a really good job of guessing which
character set is being used in a file; if I didn't tell it explicitly
that the file was UTF-8, it kept defaulting to MacRoman and showing
garbage. This was corrected by overriding it's "Automatic" choice in
the Open dialog, though.


TextEdit won't let me save in an inappropriate format and insists on utf for Latin Extended-A text. It changed the font of copied rich text from Helvetica to Monaco. I think the Western MacRoman of the OP probably garbled my non-ASCII characters, if his news reader doesn't automatically reformat to utf to read messages written in utf.



TextMate, in contrast, didn't seem to have any trouble (or else it
defaults to UTF-8 when it can't figure out the encoding, rather than
defaulting to MacRoman).

I happened to be making adjustments yesterdat in Mail.app and noticed I had long ago elected the preference "rich text" over "plain text." I think the basic question here is not so much about the meaning of "plain text" as about the meaning of "formatting": is "rich text" a degree of formatting but (much) less than HTML?

My understanding -- which is limited -- is that the "Rich Text" option
in Mail has changed meanings between versions.

There is a markup language that is more limited than HTML, which some
people have advanced as appropriate for use in email, and find much
preferable. (Because it's more limited, it doesn't have some of the
annoyances and vulnerabilities that actual HTML mail does.) I think in
one of its early versions, Mail.app used this markup when sending
messages. This is generally referred to by its MIME type,
"text/enriched", or sometimes by the RFC that defines it, RFC1896 [2].

However, starting with Tiger (10.4), Mail.app switched from using
text/enriched as its "Rich Text" mode, to using full-bore HTML. [3]
You can confirm this for yourself by composing a draft message in Rich
Text mode, then closing it, selecting it in the Drafts box, and
choosing View/Message/Raw Source. It will show in the header:

Content-Type: text/html;
charset=US-ASCII

Because Mail is encoding all the non-ASCII characters as HTML
entities, character sets don't really enter into the equation.

I don't know if that will clarify or just confuse the situation
further ... hopefully it'll help.



That was precisely my experience. It confirms my supposition that rich text, as I had selected in Mail.app preferences, is, or has evolved into, a lesser form of HTML. To get back to the OP, is such formatting an offense against rules forbidding HTML-formatting? There is such a rule against HTML-formatting in Usenet, but users of languages requiring utf have disregarded that rule in soc.culture.* language groups without reprimand for at least the last ten years. Perhaps it was utf plain text all along.




[1]: Pretty much all of the "Latin-1 Symbols" listed here (search for
"Apple Mac Shortcuts for Latin-1 symbols"):
<http://www.pgdp.net/c/faq/proofreading_guidelines.php>

[2]: RFC 1896: "The text/enriched MIME Content-type"
<http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1896.html>

[3]: Cf. <http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-39813.html>



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