Accents or special characters not showing properly when

Question

Level 2

270 points

Accents or special characters not showing properly when

Hi I was just wondering what is going on with mail 2. When I'm typing an email in french (with accents) the receiver is seeing corrupted characters like dÃ©solÃ© or ï¿¼ï¿¼.

So what is going on ? I tried the text encoding thing and set it to Western Latin 1. But the thing is, I have to change it everytime I want to send an email. Which is kinda stupid.

I also checked ou my G3 that has panther with mail 1, and it is set to automatic text encoding and everything is fine.

What is going on here ? Please help !

Posted on Aug 3, 2005 7:37 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Eddie Vedder Author

Level 2

270 points

Aug 5, 2005 12:55 PM in response to Eddie Vedder

Well if anyone has the same problem, I just solved it.

If you ever play in your Character Palette in the International preferences pane, you'll see a couple of options. Roman, Chinese, Traditional chinese japanese yada yada yada. If Roman isn't selected, it will send your email messages using the characters you chose in that Character Palette.

Ex: If you chose Chinese, your accents like éèàçù in words will apear like this dÃ©solÃ©. Weird hunh?

Well there you go. so 1. Check if your encoding in mail is set to Automatic. 2. check and see in your character palette (input menu) that you have selected Roman.

Otherwise, they won't see your real accents !

Have a nice day !

Reply

Answer 2

Aug 5, 2005 12:58 PM in response to Eddie Vedder

On top of this, make sure your keyboard is set to US Standard. You probably have it set to Canadian CSA. The accents you are used to, all fall under the US Standard Keyboard (option e e is - é) etc. (option e e under CSA shows as ?e)

Reply

Answer 3

Eddie Vedder Author

Level 2

270 points

Aug 5, 2005 1:02 PM in response to Eddie Vedder

Well it is set to CSA because I have a french canadian keyboard. So everything is working just perfectly !

Reply

Answer 4

Aug 5, 2005 1:04 PM in response to Eddie Vedder

Cool. I type 90% english, so when I need to type a bit of French I just use the hidden keyboards.

Reply

Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,130 points

Aug 5, 2005 3:09 PM in response to Eddie Vedder

Eddie -- I think the problem may be caused by the rich/plain text setting. See this note for some info:

Tom Gewecke, "kmail: Fixing Garbled Text in Win Outlook from Tiger Mail", 06:15pm May 27, 2005 CDT

Reply

Answer 6

Eddie Vedder Author

Level 2

270 points

Aug 25, 2005 1:58 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thankyou verymuch, I was just about to post cause what I thought fixed the problem, didn't. I only sent text, not with attachements. I will try your solution and see what it will do for me.

I I have to set it to windows iso or windows latin what should I use instead of UTF-8 ?

Reply

Answer 7

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,130 points

Aug 27, 2005 7:11 AM in response to Eddie Vedder

I only sent text, not with attachements.

In Mail Preferences > Composing > Format make sure it says Plain Text and not Rich Text. Also uncheck the box in Responding that says Reply in the same format.

If I have to set it to windows iso or windows latin what should I use instead of UTF-8 ?

Windows ISO is better.

Reply

Answer 8

Eddie Vedder Author

Level 2

270 points

Sep 13, 2005 9:10 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

what is the code to enter in the terminal so I can set it to windows ISO automatically. cause when I tried it by myself I lost everything in the message encoding window.

Reply

Answer 9

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,130 points

Sep 14, 2005 8:10 AM in response to Eddie Vedder

Actually there is no "Windows ISO". It's Western (Windows) as opposed to Western (ISO).

I think for Western Windows it should be

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "WINDOWS-1252"

For Western ISO it should be

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "ISO-8859-1"

Reply

Answer 10

Krafix

Level 2

159 points

Nov 4, 2005 9:47 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

And the code to revert to automatic by default? Just replace the CAPS by "AUTOMATIC" or "AUTO"? I'm not a big terminal lover and always like to know in advance the revert procedure, just in case. Thanks.

Reply

Answer 11

Eddie Vedder Author

Level 2

270 points

Nov 4, 2005 10:50 AM in response to Krafix

I don't know, but both ISO Latin or Windows Latin didn't work for me, it's still acting and displaying the caracters ont the other end's email app. Really frustrating. I think I might even re-install everything.

Reply