Why no Cyrillic?

[Mike Trittipo]

2009/2/5 Richard Robin <rrobin at gwu.edu> wrote:
> Bill Leidy's =D0=BD=D0=B0 =D0 text raises an interesting issue. . . .
> Of course, for "=D0=B0" text important enough . . . one
> could pop the entire text into Word and then write a long macro . . ..

One needn't write one's own, of course.  One can freeload ... err, use
services or software written by others.  There are at least a couple
of other solutions for recipients of such texts, than writing one's
own macro.

One is to copy the text in a _text editor_ (not a word processor),
replace every space with a space plus the number 20 (i.e., " ">" 20"),
and replace every equals sign with a space, then copy-paste the result
into the UTF-8 box at this page:
http://rishida.net/scripts/uniview/conversion
then press "convert." For longer texts, one can end up with code
points out of range due to how line breaks, etc. have been handled or
with mixed character sets.  But for shorter ones, it could be handy.

Another solution (pending the day when everyone is using reasonable
software) might come from the good folks at Columbia and Kermit.  The
author of the page at http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html notes
that "When submissions arrive by email encoded in some other character
set ... I use the TRANSLATE command of C-Kermit on the Unix host
(where I read my mail) to convert the character set to UTF-8 (I could
also use Kermit 95 for this; it has the same TRANSLATE command).
That's it -- no "Web authoring" tools, no locales, no "smart"
anything. It's just plain text, nothing more. By the way, there's
nothing special about EMACS -- any text editor will do, providing it
allows entry of arbitrary 8-bit bytes as text, including the 0x80-0x9F
'C1' range."  I have not used Kermit for years, so I cannot vouch for
it.  But it might be worth investigating.

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