Re: List oddity

From: Markus G. Kuhn (kuhn@cs.purdue.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 31 1997 - 13:26:50 EDT


Mark Leisher wrote on 1997-07-31 16:11 UTC:
> I just noticed that the unicode@unicode.org list processor appears to be
> inserting a no-break space (0xA0) in front of 8859-1 characters (see my .sig
> below). At least I think it is the Unicode list because it does not happen
> locally or on other mailing lists.
>
> Here is the name in UTF-8 just to see what happens to it:
> Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> mleisher@crl.nmsu.edu
> Mark Leisher "A designer knows he has achieved perfection
> Computing Research Lab not when there is nothing left to add, but
> New Mexico State University when there is nothing left to take away."
> Box 30001, Dept. 3CRL -- Antoine de Saint-Exup éry
> Las Cruces, NM 88003

This is correct. The last word (Exup<'e>ry> on the second last line of
your signature was received here as

  4578 7570 a0e9 7279
            !!

Interestingly though, the UTF-8 version you gave before the signatuere
was *NOT* disturbed:

  4578 7570 c3a9 7279

This is very wierd. Here is a test sequence of all ISO 8859-1
characters sent out by me in the 8-bit encoding (no quoted printable, but
I can't guarantee that some sendmail on the line will do the conversion):

 !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
 ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬­®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿
ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞß
àáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿ

X11 users are unlikely to notice this, because most ISO 8859 fonts
that come with X11R4/5/6 are severely brocken and do not display
NBSP as a spacing character. The font files do not contain NBSP at
all, it seems the font designers had though this is a control character.
I reported it years ago and it was never fixed ... :-( If you are an
X11 application developper, it might be good practice to test whether your
output font has a NBSP character and if no then replace it by space.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Science grad student, Purdue
University, Indiana, USA -- email: kuhn@cs.purdue.edu



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