Configuring Mail and News Readers

One of the joys of APL is the way that the expanded character set gives us brevity and clarity of expression. A downside is that when we need to squeeze APL through Mail and News applications which have their roots in 7-bit ASCII what the sender sends isn't always the same as the receiver receives - at some stage the code collapses into a heap of question marks or becomes illegible. It doesn't have to be this way and the intention of this page is to set out working configurations for as many mail/news clients as possible.

Goal

What we want to achieve is a three-step exchange of APL code:

APL code in a workspace

is copy/pasted into a mail message or news posting body

Sent by Person A

may be forwarded and/or replied to (possibly more than once)

Received by Person B

is copy/pasted into a workspace

APL code in a workspace

The recipes below have been partly generated by trial-and-error; please correct, amend and extend as you see fit...

Platforms

Windows

Mail Clients

Thunderbird

Fonts and Encodings:

• Proportional (Sans-serif)
• Serif (Times New Roman)
• Sans-serif (Arial)
• Monospace (Lucida Console)

Outgoing Mail - Unicode (UTF-8) Incoming Mail - Unicode (UTF-8)

Using the above settings it was possible to copy/paste from a Dyalog 12 (Unicode) session into a mail message. send it, receive it and copy/paste back into a Dyalog 12 (Unicode) session. APL characters were legible at all stages - default font was used (no attempt to override).

NewsReaders

XNews

So far as I can tell XNews(5.04.25) can't be configured to either send or receive as Unicode

Mac

Mail Clients

NewsReaders

Linux

Mail Clients

NewsReaders