[OT] News readers (was Re: A missing feature of APL expressed in the Wikipedia)

> Hello, Stefano. May I suggest that you switch from you current *Microsoft
> Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2180* to something like, for instance
> *Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr-FR; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910*
> (The Mozilla 1.7.2 works well too; both are free).

You may suggest. But I won't. ^_^ I don't see anything wrong with Outlook
Express and I won't "pollute" my production machine with Mozilla. Don't get
me wrong. I have Thunderbird installed on other machines: it's a great piece
of software and I use it from time to time to double-check my CSS (not that
it makes a real difference since our customers are ALL Internet Explorer
based). I never used its mail-news reader since it's too much of a hassle to
have to reconfigure it, re-import all my archives and things like that. Plus
I would need to re-install everything every time I switch to a new PC while
OE is there, pre-installed for me and I need less than 2 minutes to
reconfigure it.
The subject of APL characters in e-mails as well as Usenet postings has been
beaten to death several times, in various fora and, eventually, it's always
degenerated in a flame war between those who think that e-mail should be
pure (7 bits only) and those who think that sending huge JPGs or extremely
complex HTML pages with embedded fonts should be allowed in these days of
broadband internet connections. Personally I don't care much, as long as I
can understand what a poster is trying to say: the connection at the office
is fast enough and most of the time the code samples are so simple that
transliterated or not are still easy to understand.
References:
http://www.vector.org.uk/?fetch=v184/ed184.htm
http://www.vector.org.uk/?fetch=v193/ed193.htm
--
WildHeart'2k4

"Stefano Lanzavecchia" <wildstf@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:2s1rosF1fe76vU1@uni-berlin.de...
>
> You may suggest. But I won't. ^_^ I don't see anything wrong with Outlook
> Express

then you have been fortunate  --  OE has crashed on me more than once,
and left me feeling stupid for having so much stuff in .dbx files  --  and
the publicly available recovery tools didn't help much

> The subject of APL characters in e-mails as well as Usenet postings has
> been beaten to death several times, in various fora and, eventually, it's
> always degenerated in a flame war between those who think that e-mail
> should be pure (7 bits only) and those who think that sending huge JPGs
> or extremely complex HTML pages with embedded fonts should be allowed
> in these days of broadband internet connections.

and there appears to be no middle way  --  which is odd, because I
frequently see Gr, Chinese and Japanese characters in plain text emails,
occasionally Cyrillic, but never APL

(or Hebrew, or Arabic  --  must be that left <- right biz . . . )

all the best   . . .   /phil

>> You may suggest. But I won't. ^_^ I don't see anything wrong with Outlook
 
>
> then you have been fortunate  --  OE has crashed on me more than once,
> and left me feeling stupid for having so much stuff in .dbx files  --  and
> the publicly available recovery tools didn't help much

I feel really sorry for all those who have had problems in their computing
lives with Internet Explorer, Office or Outlook Express. I am not a
particularly sophisticated user and never imposed a particular heavy load on
any of those programs (never tried to produce a 500 pages document with
loads of tables and pictures, my main PST e-mail archives reached the 1 Gig
threshold recently and my dbx files are relatively small) but I have never
had a single problem in my entire career. I started on Word 2.0 for DOS and
am now using Office 2003.
I don't really know what to recommend.
--
WildHeart'2k4

"Stefano Lanzavecchia" <wildstf@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:2s4fubF1h4sf0U1@uni-berlin.de...
>
> I feel really sorry for all those who have had problems in their computing
> lives with Internet Explorer, Office or Outlook Express. I am not a
> particularly sophisticated user and never imposed a particular heavy load
on
> any of those programs (never tried to produce a 500 pages document with
> loads of tables and pictures, my main PST e-mail archives reached the 1
Gig
> threshold recently and my dbx files are relatively small) but I have never
> had a single problem in my entire career. I started on Word 2.0 for DOS
and
> am now using Office 2003.
> I don't really know what to recommend.

well, I was placing a heavy load on OE, and it didn't like it  --  on one
occasion, the Deleted Items file hit 2Gbytes, and the whole system
stopped  --  I now know about wly maintenance  --  but since I don't use
OE that heavily any more, it isn't an issue

I use web-based mail where I might need to keep copies, Xnews is
great for browsing binaries NGs, but I still use OE for the lighter stuff
(with script blocking on, and avoiding all unsolicited executables  --
security is not OE's strong point)

all the best   . . .   /phil

"James J. Weinkam" <jjw@cs.sfu.ca> wrote in message
news:cjhl07$sqa$1@morgoth.sfu.ca...
> phil chastney wrote: 
>
> Change the character encoding for your outgoing message from ISO-8859-1 to
> UTF-8.  Then all you have to do is figure out the  encoding for the APL
> characters.  APL2 provides functions to translate between the APL
> character set and either UTF-8 or UTF-7.  With other APLs YMMV.

as you probably realise, I'm already using UTF-8, so I can see other scripts

APL embedded in ng messages should be independent of vendor, and ought to
use the Unicode codepoints written into the APL standard  --  that's what
standards are for, surely?

likewise, APL generated from an APL system ought to produce output strictly
in accordance with that same standard  --  what they accept on input is
another matter, but I see no conflict between tolerant input and strict
output  --  and, if the vendors can manage that, what encoding they use
internally is no concern of mine

> If the recipient's mail and/or news reader is configured to recognize and
> display UTF-8 he will see APL characters.  <snip>

. . . bearing in mind that part of that configuration involves choosing a
default newsgroup display font which has appropriate glyphs at the
appropriate codepoints

it sounds easy enough  --  so why has this been such a sticking point?

regards   . . .   /phil