> Which is fine if the person reading your message is using the same font
> as you are

The font is not the issue. The important things are encoded in the headers
of the email:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

(from Lonnie's original message).

It says which character set is is using -- and that /is/ a standard (and a
pretty commonly used one at that) --, and it says how this 8 bit character
set is encoded into 7 bit -- and that is also a (pretty commonly used)
standard.

The raw text looks like this:
"One easy trick is to use m for milli and =B5 for micro,
 to type the mu "=B5"- hold [ALT} and type 0181 on the numeric keypad."

There's nothing non-ASCII in there. The =B5 is the quoted-printable
encoding for that character in the ISO-8859-1 font. This is such a common
standard font that any email software should have at least a translation
table for it.

It's up to the email processing software to be compliant with email
standards and decode and display such a message correctly, with whatever
font it uses. Some have trouble with email standards, but most don't.


The problem with Howard's message is this:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

His email software assumes an 8 bit transmission path (which obviously
wasn't given), Lonnie's email software doesn't.

Gerhard
_______________________________________________
http://www.piclist.com
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist