Accent marks

N

NWFriend

Using Entourage 2004. My last name has an accent mark in it - á. I spell it
with this accented a in the account info. A friend has just pointed out that
in my emails to him (and I've confirmed now to everyone else as well), my
last name appears with spaces on either side of the accented a, (i.e., as
xxxx á xxxx, rather than xxxxáxxxx). If I replace the á with an unaccented
a, the extra spaces disappear. Anyone have any idea how to make the extra
spaces go away while retaining the correct spelling of my last name? Thanks.
Rick
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]

NWFriend said:
Using Entourage 2004. My last name has an accent mark in it - á. I spell it
with this accented a in the account info. A friend has just pointed out that
in my emails to him (and I've confirmed now to everyone else as well), my
last name appears with spaces on either side of the accented a, (i.e., as
xxxx á xxxx, rather than xxxxáxxxx). If I replace the á with an unaccented
a, the extra spaces disappear. Anyone have any idea how to make the extra
spaces go away while retaining the correct spelling of my last name? Thanks.
Rick
Click to expand...


It probably is an e-mail client issue. I suspect his e-mail client
doesn't recognize the charset used to send your e-mail.
You can always try to send as text only (which should support á in
extended US-ASCII),
With most clients though, this is not a problem (I also have an accent
in my last name),

Corentin
 
C

Chris Ridd

It probably is an e-mail client issue. I suspect his e-mail client
doesn't recognize the charset used to send your e-mail.
You can always try to send as text only (which should support á in
extended US-ASCII),
With most clients though, this is not a problem (I also have an accent
in my last name),
Click to expand...

Entourage *does* incorrectly encode non-ASCII characters in message headers
though. It puts the character set instruction just before the accented
character, instead of at the beginning of the entire string. I could imagine
that will cause problems with some UAs like NWFriend is reporting.

Compare MacSoup's headers with a message you post from Entourage ;-)

Cheers,

Chris
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]

Chris Ridd said:
Entourage *does* incorrectly encode non-ASCII characters in message headers
though. It puts the character set instruction just before the accented
character, instead of at the beginning of the entire string. I could imagine
that will cause problems with some UAs like NWFriend is reporting.
Click to expand...

Indeed it does:
Cras-M=?ISO-8859-1?B?6Q==?=neur

but still, it doesn't look really invalid to me (but I'm not an
expert). It uses plain regular ISO 8859-1 which definitively supports
"á".
I agree that specifying the encoding first would make things easier
though.
Again, most e-mail clients are OK with that. Their just using mixed
encoding.

Compare MacSoup's headers with a message you post from Entourage ;-)
Click to expand...

:->



Corentin
 
C

Chris Ridd

Indeed it does:
Cras-M=?ISO-8859-1?B?6Q==?=neur

but still, it doesn't look really invalid to me (but I'm not an
expert). It uses plain regular ISO 8859-1 which definitively supports
"á".
I agree that specifying the encoding first would make things easier
though.
Click to expand...

The bug is that the character set stuff ("encoded words" according to RFC
1342) cannot go in the middle of the string according to the standards. The
rules in RFC 1342 are a little complicated, and Entourage just gets them
wrong.
Again, most e-mail clients are OK with that. Their just using mixed
encoding.
Click to expand...

You're relying on them being able to interpret malformed text, which isn't a
good idea. The standards are there for good reasons, and since everything
seems to be able to interpret correctly encoded strings there is no reason
for Entourage to do this wrong. (I'm sure it is just a bug and not
deliberate.)
:->
Click to expand...

Cheers,

Chris
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]

Chris Ridd said:
You're relying on them being able to interpret malformed text, which isn't a
good idea. The standards are there for good reasons, and since everything
seems to be able to interpret correctly encoded strings there is no reason
for Entourage to do this wrong. (I'm sure it is just a bug and not
deliberate.)
Click to expand...

Which is also what I do for malformed html and web browsers :-> I
perfectl get your point though,

Corentin
 
N

NWFriend

Which is also what I do for malformed html and web browsers :-> I
perfectl get your point though,

Corentin
Click to expand...
So aside from all the technical stuff, which is important, but which means
little to me, is there a way to get the spelling of my name correct in E2004
while also having it display correctly in the emails I send to others, using
both Mac and PC's? If so, could someone please give me the simple solution?
Thanks!
 
C

Chris Ridd

So aside from all the technical stuff, which is important, but which means
:)

little to me, is there a way to get the spelling of my name correct in E2004
while also having it display correctly in the emails I send to others, using
both Mac and PC's? If so, could someone please give me the simple solution?
Click to expand...

Since it seems to be caused by a bug in Entourage 2004, all you can do is
give "feedback" to MS using the Help menu. For feedback, read bug report.

The more people that report it, the more likely it is to be fixed.

Cheers,

Chris
 
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