mysterious Eudora keyboard incident

[Richard Robin]

Dear SEELANGovtsy,

I will forward Paul Gallagher's remarks. Eudora's inability to handle
non-Western encoding has been legendary. As of 2006, Eudora 7 still did not
support Unicode (which is capable of representing nearly all writing
systems). Even before the advent of Unicode, early versions of Eudora often
dropped certain Cyrillic letters (among them p and я), which in some
encoding systems occupied reserved codes. For example, in what was then
Window's brand-new Russian encoding system, the lowercase p was assigned to
the same code as a soft hyphen (the kind used to automatically hyphenate
documents). But Eudora interpreted that code as unreadable (no soft hyphens
in e-mail), no matter what the language. So back then, just as I was
beginning to require my students to send e-mail in Cyrillic, I warned
students to stay away from Eudora and AOL mail (another Unicode miscreant at
the time).

The one sure way to send and receive Cyrillic laden e-mail (and there
*are* others)
is to (1) have a web-based e-mail service like Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo;
(2) set the default character set/encoding to UTF-8 (not Western or Latin);
(3) make sure that you are both sending and receiving rich / formatted /
html and not plain text.

The Eudora website has a forum where lots of users complain about the lack
of foreign language support, and Qualcomm, Eudora's producer, has apparently
realized that they have to start over. The opening page on their site says:
"Qualcomm and other contributors are developing a new, open source version
of Eudora which is currently in early beta test."

I suspect they'll support Unicode. But I bet it's too late for them to
regain market share.

-Rich Robin

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Paul B. Gallagher <
paulbg at pbg-translations.com> wrote:

> ameliede at EARTHLINK.NET wrote:
>
>  Dear colleagues:
>> See if you can figure this one out: Using Eudora I have never been able to
>> do Cyrillic.
>
>

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