wrholt |
August 29, 2011 08:44 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by laepelba
(Post 116444)
Not that I defend things that have been written incorrectly, but it has been explained to me that (at least in email) you can't always guarantee that tildes and other non-English-based punctuation can transfer as written, but sometimes come through as a jumble of alt-characters. I have found that happens to me when I attempt to be (ahem) and use the tildes, etc. anyway. :(
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Yes, that still happens sometimes.
[put on technical-expert hat]
This problem is a historical artefact of the development of communication systems, including teletype communications. Historically there have been many different schemes for representing text data electronically. Most schemes are capable of representing text in only one or a small number of languages. And for many types of documents there is NO standard means to record either the encoding scheme that was used or to detect what the scheme was. So, if your document editing/display program expects text in one encoding system and it tries to display text from a different encoding system, the mismatched characters show up as garbled text.
The good news is that the situation is changing with the increasing popularity of Unicode, an encoding scheme that can accommodate texts written in any combination of most existing scripts. The bad news is that not all older documents or legacy software systems have been converted to use Unicode.
[/put on technical-expert hat]
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