Computer question: Eudora and Russian?

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Follow-up on my earlier question:

> > I'm thinking about maybe switching from Netscape 4.78 to Eudora 5.1
> > for email, and I have a few questions:

Qualcomm tech support says

"The English version of Eudora only supports the ISO-8859-1 standard.
Eudora is available, however, for specific languages such as Japanese
and French."

When I inquired about Russian, I was told:

"Unfortunately, we do not have a Russian version of Eudora (localized).
However, there may be third-party plug-ins available on the Net to read
and send using a Cyrillic character set, however, this is not a
supported feature."

I fiddled around with the settings for a bit, and I was able to send a
Cyrillic message to myself, but the header specified the ISO-8859-1
("Western") character set, so Netscape could only read it after I
clicked reply and selected a Cyrillic encoding for the Composition
window, a major inconvenience.

   Sidebar:
   Eudora is not Unicode-aware, so it lists all fonts in single-
   byte terms. Thus, Times New Roman is listed as "Times New
   Roman Baltic," "Times New Roman Cyr," "Times New Roman Greek,"
   etc. This means in principle that you can select these code
   pages for display and sending, but in practice, since Eudora
   marks all messages as ISO-8859-1 ("Western"), the recipient
   must have a way to overrule its lie.

When I returned the message to myself and tried to read it in Eudora, it
was displayed in Western encoding, notwithstanding the fact that I had
specified that mail was to be displayed in the font Times New Roman Cyr.

In principle, a message could be sent in HTML ("styled text"), but the
tag that specifies the character set, <META http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=windows-1251">, would have to be inserted in
the head of the HTML message, and Eudora does not appear to offer access
to the head, only to the body.

It seems that at the moment, Eudora is much too clumsy in this respect
to be useful to someone using Cyrillic on a regular basis.

Thanks to all for your input.

--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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