On Saturday, November 16, 2013 at 9:38:50 PM UTC-4, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 11/15/2013 10:27 AM, Lizzie wrote:
>
> > 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>

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?

--

Rick C. (Lorem Ipsum)

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On Tuesday, September 13, 2022 at 2:25:10 PM UTC-4, gnuarm.del...@gmail.com wrote:
> 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.