Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?

On 15/10/17 04:33, Whiskers wrote:

UTF-8 is the current standard for usenet

Was it in this newsgroup that I mentioned that that's a common
misconception? UTF-8 is the standard for NNTP, which is the transport
mechanism, but not for the message content. For the message headers,
7-bit ASCII is the only acceptable encoding. For the message body, the
character set SHOULD be specified in a MIME header, but if it isn't
specified then the default is 7-bit ASCII.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Den 14-10-2017 kl. 17:52 skrev harry newton:
He who is J. P. Gilliver (John) said on Sat, 14 Oct 2017 13:17:27 +0100:

Do these solutions (:set encoding and :set guifont) mean that you no
longer need to undo curly/smart/whatever quotes, since you can now see
them in vi, or do you still (maybe for other things using the text)
need to change them?

As you may know, I have a zillion text files where I ad hoc store bits and
pieces of technical information, often to be compiled later for
cohesiveness.

All I ever wanted was to just be able to *see* the characters that were cut
and pasted into those text files when they came from a copy of a web page
that used the curly quotes (and other curly stuff).

Ah - but that was not what you asked for.

With the simple change of the font from the default to Courier New, I gain
everything that I originally asked for.

Had *anyone* known that in the three groups invited to this thread, then
this entire thread would have consisted of only three posts:
1. Ask the question
2. Someone provides the answer (which is to just change the font)
3. Thank that person

The only reason this thread is huge is that *nobody* knew the answer (least
of all me).

I think very many people knew how to solve the problem. If only
the problem had been described, and not half an imagined solution.

Goes to show that sometimes asking the right question is half the answer.

[Snip]

/Anders, Denmark

On Sat, 14 Oct 2017 21:45:21 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

"Jack Campin" wrote

| "This", for me, is alt.usage.english. I have never subscribed to
| any Windows newsgroup and try to waste as little mental effort on
| Windows as I possibly can. (I quite like Microsoft's application
| software - run it on a Mac and it's fine).
|
| Followups set to aue.
|

Sorry. That doesn't work. I'm not subscribed to
alt.usage.english. But maybe we should stop this
crossposting, anyway. I don't really know why
Harry keeps adding that group to his Windows posts.
I guess I just figured it didn't hurt to hear from the
occasional witty Brit so I ignored it. But UTF-8
and codepages are really not credibly related to
English usage.

alt.usage.english deals with any and many varieties of English
worldwide.

As it happens, UTF-8 and codepages are of practical interest to AUE-ers.
We wish to represent sounds using IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).
That uses characters that look as though they might have been deposited
on Earth by Aliens.
See the charts starting he
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intern...bet#Consonants


--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

In article ,
Whiskers wrote:

You're the one complicating things, by trying to deny that UTF-8 is the
global standard character set. Which it is. UTF-8 is not the same as
'Unicode', although the terms are often interchanged erroneously.

UTF-8 is not a character set.

Unicode *is* (among other things) a character set, and UTF-8 is
an encoding of it.

-- Richard

In article , am
says...
The character who uses the handle "Good Guy"
likes to post in HTML. He also adds a little rant about it to
his posts. Something to the effect of "screw you, you're
getting HTML whether you like it or not." But the HTML is
invisible to people reading in plain text format. We see his
nasty tirades in plain text.

"we"???

I've never seen them or even heard of him until your post.

Janet

"Janet" wrote

| The character who uses the handle "Good Guy"
| likes to post in HTML. He also adds a little rant about it to
| his posts. Something to the effect of "screw you, you're
| getting HTML whether you like it or not." But the HTML is
| invisible to people reading in plain text format. We see his
| nasty tirades in plain text.
|
| "we"???
|
| I've never seen them or even heard of him until your post.
|

He's a strident, anti-social Windows defender and
booster who frequents Windows groups. I'd think he
might be a Microsoft shill but those people are never
foul tempered. At any rate, you're not missing anything.

In message , Mayayana
writes:
[]
It's common courtesy not to send in HTML in any
situation. Some clients won't be able to read it.
HTML email is also a security and privacy risk. It's
also a good idea, for the same reason, to disable
HTML reading of newsgroups and email. In most
cases that won't be a problem. It's standard in email
to send as both plain text and HTML when HTML
email is sent. Except in rare cases, with your client
set to plain text you'll just get the plain text version
of whatever email is sent and not miss anything. The
exception would be the occasional commercial or
malware email designed to work only as HTML.
[]
One of the UK hardware retailers that send me emails I usually see as
(more or less) the single line "Our emails look better in HTML". Just
that one line. This is because they _have_ sent it as a multipart
message, but the plain text part consists of just that line. Which is
self-fulfilling, certainly, but isn't quite the intent of multipart
plain text and HTML: as you say, the same information should be
contained in both. What they have done would be better expressed as "our
emails are only _legible_ in HTML".
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Society has the right to punish wrongdoing; it doesn't have the right to make
punishment a form of entertainment. This is where things have gone wrong:
humiliating other people has become both a blood sport and a narcotic.
- Joe Queenan, RT 2015/6/27-7/3

In message , Mayayana
writes:
[]
in Windows. You can split hairs and say it's not officially
ANSI. That's true. But then you need to offer a better
term that everyone is familiar with for 8-bit encoding
using codepages. ANSI is the popular and traditional way
to name it. (We talked about this before. People say jello
for gelatin dessert. The jell-o company might not like
that. I don't know. But I don't know anyone who calls it
"sweetened and flavored gelatin dessert". whether or not
it was made with jell-o brand jello, we call it jello! And we
say ANSI. Not a big deal.)
[]
Since you said in another post you don't mind the occasional bit of dry
Brit:

What you call jello or jell-o (or should that be Jell-o if it's a proper
name?), we call jelly. (Sweetened fruity dessert made with gelatine:
wobbly stuff.) Which I'm quite aware is what you call, what we call jam
(fruit preserve, usually comes in jars, that you might add to buttered
bread or buttered toast). [Except when it's made from citrus fruit -
usually orange - with bits of peel in it; then we call it marmalade.] I
don't know if there's any substance that you call jam.

P. S.: my spell-checker suggests for the first three "Jell-O", i. e.
capital J and O.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Society has the right to punish wrongdoing; it doesn't have the right to make
punishment a form of entertainment. This is where things have gone wrong:
humiliating other people has become both a blood sport and a narcotic.
- Joe Queenan, RT 2015/6/27-7/3

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Mayayana
writes:
[]
It's common courtesy not to send in HTML in any
situation. Some clients won't be able to read it.
HTML email is also a security and privacy risk. It's
also a good idea, for the same reason, to disable
HTML reading of newsgroups and email. In most
cases that won't be a problem. It's standard in email
to send as both plain text and HTML when HTML
email is sent. Except in rare cases, with your client
set to plain text you'll just get the plain text version
of whatever email is sent and not miss anything. The
exception would be the occasional commercial or
malware email designed to work only as HTML.
[]
One of the UK hardware retailers that send me emails I usually see as
(more or less) the single line "Our emails look better in HTML". Just
that one line. This is because they _have_ sent it as a multipart
message, but the plain text part consists of just that line. Which is
self-fulfilling, certainly, but isn't quite the intent of multipart
plain text and HTML: as you say, the same information should be
contained in both. What they have done would be better expressed as "our
emails are only _legible_ in HTML".

That is nothing to do with looks.

And everything to do with tracking beacons.

The idea is, if you "read" an HTML email as HTML,
the sender is alerted you've seen the message.

That's one of the reasons I enjoyed my previous email
client so much. It didn't display HTML, and could only
show you things as text. It meant your average
booby-trapped email, was far less effective.

Paul

In message , Paul
writes:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Mayayana
writes:
[]
It's common courtesy not to send in HTML in any
situation. Some clients won't be able to read it.
HTML email is also a security and privacy risk. It's
also a good idea, for the same reason, to disable
HTML reading of newsgroups and email. In most
cases that won't be a problem. It's standard in email
to send as both plain text and HTML when HTML
email is sent. Except in rare cases, with your client
set to plain text you'll just get the plain text version
of whatever email is sent and not miss anything. The
exception would be the occasional commercial or
malware email designed to work only as HTML.
[]
One of the UK hardware retailers that send me emails I usually see as
(more or less) the single line "Our emails look better in HTML". Just
that one line. This is because they _have_ sent it as a multipart
message, but the plain text part consists of just that line. Which is
self-fulfilling, certainly, but isn't quite the intent of multipart
plain text and HTML: as you say, the same information should be
contained in both. What they have done would be better expressed as
"our emails are only _legible_ in HTML".

That is nothing to do with looks.

And everything to do with tracking beacons.

No, tracking beacons are a later addition (though I agree, somewhat
universal these days).

In the early days, dual-part emails and posts contained the same text,
but the HTML version had formatting bits in too.

The idea is, if you "read" an HTML email as HTML,
the sender is alerted you've seen the message.

That's one of the reasons I enjoyed my previous email
client so much. It didn't display HTML, and could only
show you things as text. It meant your average
booby-trapped email, was far less effective.

Paul

My current (well, stopped development in 2007, but I still use it)
email/news client _does_ parse _some_ HTML, but only "safe" - no
scripting; I think it also doesn't do online images (or has the option
not to do them which I selected years ago and have forgotten where the
setting is). So (if I choose to look at the HTML version) I can see the
text laid out as the sender intended, but no pictures (so no tracking).

[It also does true embedded images - even in otherwise plain text
posts/emails - but I don't use those, because most modern clients can't
handle a truly embedded image. (They expect - and send, when sending - a
_link_ within the email, to an image attached at the end; if they
receive a truly embedded image, they show the text that comes after it
as if it were an attachment.)]
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Well, let's put it this way. I may not be as good as Olivier but on the other
hand I'm taller than him. - Roger Moore, quoted by Barry Norman

On Mon, 16 Oct 2017 23:35:19 -0400, Paul
wrote:

That is nothing to do with looks.

And everything to do with tracking beacons.

The idea is, if you "read" an HTML email as HTML,
the sender is alerted you've seen the message.

That's one of the reasons I enjoyed my previous email
client so much. It didn't display HTML, and could only
show you things as text. It meant your average
booby-trapped email, was far less effective.

Thats one of the reasons I stick with Pegasus, which is set to send
and read only in plain text.

If I *really* (and rarely) want to, I can look at the HTML attachment.

If it comes only in HTML I usually just delete it, as it's usually
spam anyone.

There are a few distant relatives who have a penchant for sending
e-mails in Comic Sans, perhaps in the deluded belief that it makes
them easier to read. Of course it actually makes them more difficult
to read, so unless it is more than idle chit chate I usually7 delete
those too.

--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com

On 2017-10-09, harry newton wrote:
He who is J. P. Gilliver (John) said on Mon, 9 Oct 2017 21:07:18 +0100:

[...]

And I don't see anything in Notepad++ that kicks ass yet.
(It might be there, but nothing strikes me as anything better yet.)

Incidentally: there's something very odd about some of your emails
(possibly this encoding you don't want to learn about (and which I don't
know much about). In the above email, the fifth word in the last line is
- with added spaces -

N o t e p a d + +

In some of your other emails, it isn't.

I do privatize my Usenet headers for privacy reasons, and have been doing
so for about two decades, so, the encoding listed in the header isn't
necessarily the encoding that the customized newsreader actually used.

Nothing in the header except the subject is meaningful.

It's all random. I don't even know what it is (where it's a single-blind
nearly automated privatization process). In fact, I don't know what any
single header says (without looking) except for the subject line, because I
use a randomizer to pick everything else, even the nym. The randomizer
chooses everything out of a dictionary, and it then *locks* the identity to
the thread so that it never switches identities within a thread.

The only thing that matters in my posts is the subject and the body, which
is all that matters in any Usenet thread anyway (for the FAQ-KB style of
posting).

Well in this thread, your headers include

Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

which tell the rest of the world how to try to display correctly the
characters that you have included in your 'body'. So those headers
should be of some interest to you. If you want us to see the same
characters as you think you've typed, those headers must match the
character coding you used when you typed.

The Wikipedia page for Windows-1252 is informative
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Windows-1252&oldid=805153948

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| What you call jello or jell-o (or should that be Jell-o if it's a proper
| name?), we call jelly. (Sweetened fruity dessert made with gelatine:
| wobbly stuff.) Which I'm quite aware is what you call, what we call jam
| (fruit preserve, usually comes in jars, that you might add to buttered
| bread or buttered toast). [Except when it's made from citrus fruit -
| usually orange - with bits of peel in it; then we call it marmalade.] I
| don't know if there's any substance that you call jam.
|

I wonder, is there any hope of a rational discussion
about toast spreads and desserts with people who think
Marmite is a food. Though I daresay I once turned
the tables on some British friends. We went out to a
local restaurant and I ordered Indian pudding, which is
cooked corn meal and blackstrap molasses, with vanilla
ice cream on top. The Brits were appalled and didn't
dare try the mush. (It's actually delicious. It looks a bit
like a product of bad digestion. But the hot, bitter
meal is a perfect balance to the cold, cloyingly sweet
ice cream.)

We also say jam, and sometimes preserve. And we
say jelly when it doesn't have any actual fruit in it. A
flavored gelatin spread is jelly. A fruit preserve spread is
jam. I think of jelly as basically a scam. People put it
on manufactured white bread, along with peanut-enhanced
hydrogenated oil, and call it an edible sandwich. But none
of the ingredients is really edible in terms of either flavor
or nutritional value. It's merely economical.

So maybe you don't have fruitless spreads? That's very
civilized of you. I suppose the dessert version, jello/jelly,
is also kind of a scam. There's not really much of anything
there. But it has a lot of personality. My mother used to
make it with coffee when I was young and we'd put whipped
cream on it. Very nice. And I think of marshmallow jello mold
(jello cast into a shape, filled with canned fruit debris and
little marshmallow pillows) as the epitome of suburban
ignorance. Festive, fun and painfully idiotic.

| P. S.: my spell-checker suggests for the first three "Jell-O", i. e.
| capital J and O.

It sounds like your spell checker has been paid off by
corporate interests.

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| That is nothing to do with looks.
|
| And everything to do with tracking beacons.
|
| No, tracking beacons are a later addition (though I agree, somewhat
| universal these days).
|

I think you're right. These days it's a handy way to
use tracking beacons, but the original intent was just
graphical richness. Back in the innocent days when no
one was attacked via email. People thought it was fun
to use ketchup-colored Comic Sans on a bile-colored
background. Then commercial emails started doing it
to look official. As with MS Word docs, it provides the
illusion of corporate stationery. Then the malware
senders realized that's a great way to fool people and
started using the stock from bank webpages to create
fake banking emails.

The way I remember it, HTML email fell out of favor
and was all but gone when webmail entities started
becoming popular. HTML email translates well into
gmail on a webpage. So things started to go the other
way. There are now spyware companies, as you
mentioned, (Constant Contact is one) that specialize
in providing email services
to businesses with the promise that they can tell you
when and how far down any email you send is read.
They depend on lack of understanding among their
customers. But I'm guessing that since so many people
use webmail these days, and webmail companies probably
don't block Web bugs or script, companies like Constant
Contact can sort of get away with their claims.

| In the early days, dual-part emails and posts contained the same text,
| but the HTML version had formatting bits in too.

I think most clients are still like that. It started out
as a way to accomodate clients that couldn't handle
HTML. But it doesn't have to be matching content. I
wrote a little thing for myself, for sending greeting
cards. I create a webpage in HTML and then import
it into an email. I set the plain text to something
like, "This is a greeting card. It can only be seen
in HTML view."

On Tue, 17 Oct 2017 10:22:01 +0200, Steve Hayes
wrote:

On Mon, 16 Oct 2017 23:35:19 -0400, Paul
wrote:

That is nothing to do with looks.

And everything to do with tracking beacons.

The idea is, if you "read" an HTML email as HTML,
the sender is alerted you've seen the message.

That's one of the reasons I enjoyed my previous email
client so much. It didn't display HTML, and could only
show you things as text. It meant your average
booby-trapped email, was far less effective.

Thats one of the reasons I stick with Pegasus, which is set to send
and read only in plain text.



Almost *any* e-mail program can do the same thing. I use Outlook.exe,
and it's set the same way.