[P1] Can't read Shravan's posts

[Richard McKay]

Am 13/12/02 22:48 schrieb "Andrew Nye" unter <andrew at nye.tc>:

> Why?

Andrew,

The short answer: his text is in the "iso-2022-jp" character set

explanation:

(someone please correct me if I'm wrong but I believe it works like this...)
Everyone has the option to have and use an OS and keyboard in the language
that is familiar to them and the mac uses this to "interpret" what you have
typed on the keyboard into meaningful input/commands/words for that language
of the OS...for example the German keyboard has the "z" key where the
English "y" key is and if I use this on my computer it says I used the "XXX
character set" when I send it to others so that when you receive it your
computer will understand this and interpret this correctly and display it in
meaningful text to you...And in this case some of us did not have this
keyboard "interpreter" so our computer couldn't understand what to do with
it and simply said "Some text in this message is in a language your computer
cannot display." upon installation of this set on our macs it would display
properly again...
If you want to play with this to understand it better (in OS X) go to System
preferences/international/input menu and check off a few wild languages and
then in the menu in finder change the keyboard by clicking on a different
flag...now try to type a normal sentence in an email/word processor...cool,
no? (to get rid of them again simply click on your flag in the menu again
and undo your previous selections in system prefs) BTW, similar languages
(Roman) have the same char set, ASCII and ANSI have 256 characters each and
languages that require more characters are in Unicode, which can have 65,536
characters, this is indirectly evident in the system
preferences/international/input menu by the right column, input type!


HTH,

Richard
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