diacritical marks on ADS-L

[Joel S. Berson]

At 1/31/2013 11:50 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>FWIW, I would follow Jon is using the spelling, _Soeze_, in imitation
>of the common method of transliterating German, simply because, AFAIK,
>the question as to what diacritics can be used in a post without
>having that post turned into a meaningless letter-salad has never been
>answered.

To try to answer:

(1)  I believe all users of ADS-L should be able
to display that set of diacritical marks --
whether by themselves or over (Latin) letters --
that are used in the so-called "Western European"
languages, such as German, French, Spanish,
Norwegian.  This is because today pretty much
every application (here meaning email
applications and browsers) supports an encoding
standard sometimes called "Latin 1", which was targeted at that "area".

While Turkish is not included (it has some
letters not in Latin 1), Latin 1 can produce a
"small letter o with diaeresis" (as it's called
in the standards world, which does not use the
term "umlaut" here).  Thus Jon could have sent
Töze and we-all (I think) could have read
it.  (If anyone couldn't read Töze with an accented o, please let me know.)

But *creating* the o-diaeresis and other accented
letters requires a bit of effort.  The method I
use (with Windows) is to select the "United
States-International" keyboard, with which
certain combinations of typing a punctuation mark
followed by a letter produce an accented
letter.  E.g., for diaeresis, double-quotation-mark (then the letter).

2)  Accented letters for other scripts-- such as
Turkish, Cyrillic, Asian, IPA (and perhaps some
transliterations of it, if they employ symbols
beyond Latin 1) -- require more accommodating
encoding (that is, larger code sets).  Unicode
(or subsets thereof) has become the standard
here.  But not all email applications have
implemented the larger code sets required.  For
such scripts, a number of us (including moi) have
to eat the meaningless lettuce-salad.

Joel

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