[tlug] "UTF-8 & ISO-2022-JP"

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

Just a quick note about getting Japanese text through the wires.  With 
webpages I'm finding that Japanese text displays fine with UTF-8 
(although the English fonts - on some machines - don't look as good as 
I've experienced using ISO-8859-1), but e-mail is another issue (you 
would think that if it worked for browsers it would work for e-mail, but 
that's not the case... yet?).

As mentioned in here previously, sending J-text to cell phones was one 
example where ISO-2022-JP was getting through the wires (and air) in 
readable form, but where UTF-8 was turning to bakemoji.  I sent a J-text 
message in UTF-8 to a Yahoo.co.jp (not sure what happens with Yahoo.com) 
address this morning and discovered that it turned to bakemoji and none 
of the Japanese encoding choices of the browser (FireFox on SuSE 9.3 
Linux) would convert it to readable form.  I resent it as ISO-2022-JP 
and it came through the wires in good condition - looking the same as it 
appeared on the originating screen.

Please note that I'm not posting this to discuss what method *ought* to 
be used, but rather to report on my on-the-ground experiences in the 
trenches with J-text messages often turning to bakemoji.  The way I have 
my e-mail client (Mozilla) set now is to UTF-8 for default messages and 
then I manually select ISO-2022-JP when I have a J-text message to send 
someone who is using software/settings/provider/whatever that only seems 
to be happy with ISO-2022-JP.

Lyle