Chinese Character Support for email Subject and Body

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Chinese Character Support for email Subject and Body

I notice that iPhone does not support any Chinese characters in its email interface. I also notice Safari support Chinese character in email Subject line but not in the email body. Is somebody working on Chinese Character display in email interface?
I also notice that contact interface support Chinese Character display very well.

Best

Shuo

Intel Core 2 Dual 2.9Ghz, Windows Vista, Latest ipHone 1.0.1 and Itune 7.3.2.6

Posted on Aug 11, 2007 1:05 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,982 points

Aug 11, 2007 2:12 PM in response to Shuo Li

I notice that iPhone does not support any Chinese characters in its email interface.

If you mean that you cannot read the text of emails in Chinese, I suspect that is because these emails fail to follow the required international encoding standards. Are there no emails which display correctly? I can send you tests if you want.

The iPhone mail program currently lacks the ability to manually correct for errors by the sender which is normally possible on a full computer.

I also notice Safari support Chinese character in email Subject line but not in the email body.

This would probably happen because of bad webmail encoding practices by the sender. Surely you can can read normal Chinese webpages without problems, right? Again the iPhone Safari lacks the abililty to correct for sender errors at this stage.

Is somebody working on Chinese Character display in email interface?

I don't know if they will implement corrections for senders that don't follow international standards, if that is the problem. This forum is just other users, so make sure you tell Apple what you want via feedback:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

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Answer 2

Shuo Li Author

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Aug 11, 2007 9:11 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

What I am saying is that I can read no Chinese character anywhere via email interface. With Sofari web browser, I can read the subject line but not the text.
If there is a way of reading email via email interface, I would like to know. How can I send email with Chinese Character to my yahoo account? What email client I want my senders to use? ie. Office Outlook + MS Pinyin IME. How do I do with iPhone differently? In other words, how do people know if their email follow the required inernational encoding standards or not.

If there is a way to send the Simplified Chinese test email to my yahoo account, please do that my email address is shuoli01@yahoo.com, or you can send to shuo.li01@comcast.net as well.

What I noticed is that your contact interface can display Chinese characters just fine. Thanks you for that. But your music interface does not display Chinese song title at all. I hope you are working on that now.

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

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115,982 points

Aug 12, 2007 3:51 AM in response to Shuo Li

I have sent you 3 test emails in 3 encodings. Let me know if you can see the bodies in any of them.

your music interface does not display Chinese song title at all

For correct display of Chinese song titles, the ID3 tags must have the proper encoding (Unicode). This may be the problem. Do you songs display properly in iTunes?

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Answer 4

Tom Gewecke

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115,982 points

Aug 12, 2007 6:17 AM in response to Shuo Li

I also sent you three additional emails to the yahoo address (the first 3 were to comcast), this time in html instead of plain text, with 3 different encodings.

Depending on which of the 6 tests display, we may be able to determine if the bug is with the iPhone, Yahoo/Comcast, or the others sending to you.

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Answer 5

Shuo Li Author

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Aug 12, 2007 1:30 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

only one of your email's Chinese character can be displayed. That's the UTF-8 encoding.
Can we expect iPhone to support GB18030? How about the music display interface? Will it support song title with GB format?
I am sorry I made a mistake on my second email address it should be shuo.li01@verizon.net

Best,

Shuo

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Answer 6

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,982 points

Aug 12, 2007 2:25 PM in response to Shuo Li

Can we expect iPhone to support GB18030?

It should already support all Chinese encodings. If it does not, that is probably a bug.

How about the music display interface? Will it support song title with GB format?

I'm sure that will never happen. Unicode is the global standard for such things.

email address it should be shuo.li01@verizon.net

I am sending three plain text messages there. Let me know which ones display.

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Answer 7

Shuo Li Author

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Aug 12, 2007 5:09 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

This does looks like a bug. iPhone can only display UTF-8 encoded Chinese Character but not GB format.
When you send me the email to shuo.li01@verizon.net, I happened to have outlook running and it received these mail. The outlook can display Chinese in all 3 encodings.
Could you enter this as a bug?

Best,

Shuo

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Answer 8

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,982 points

Aug 12, 2007 5:15 PM in response to Shuo Li

Could you enter this as a bug?

This is only a user to user forum. To tell Apple that something isn't working, use the feedback link I provided you earlier.

Also, for your song titles, the Windows program ConvertZ is often recommended for trying to convert them to the proper encoding:

http://alf-li.pcdiscuss.com/e_index.html

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Answer 9

SCBZK

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Aug 17, 2007 1:25 AM in response to Shuo Li

I receive and notice iPhone capability of displaying Japanese characters on all applications in the phone. However, converting or typing is not supported yet. I have come across a web based software that does this function, but never actually tried it out yet.

Hope this gives you some relief.

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Answer 10

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,982 points

Aug 17, 2007 4:24 AM in response to SCBZK

I have come across a web based software that does this function,

Could you provide the url please?

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Answer 11

SCBZK

Level 1

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Aug 19, 2007 6:32 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Here, these are the links. Hope someone can localize to Traditional Chinese with these authors' permission.

http://iphone.twocupsofcoffee.com/#mail

http://n.h7a.org/iphone/mail/

The latter one seems more practical. This author has also made it possible to Google in Japanese. BTW, the mail supporting thing works this way: You type in using the provided (web-based) keyboard in the appropriate columns (i.e. subject and the other for the text) and execute by choosing the appropriate nominated characters that will appear under the "keyboard". Repeating these steps will eventually compose the text. Hit "Send" on the right upper corner, voila, it activates "compose new mail" on your iPhone.

Try if you like it.

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Answer 12

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,982 points

Aug 19, 2007 7:06 AM in response to SCBZK

http://n.h7a.org/iphone/mail/

Very Cool! Thanks.

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