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:

1. APL code in a workspace is copy/pasted into a mail message or news posting body

2. Sent by Person A; May be forwarded and/or replied to (possibly more than once)

3. 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

Browsers

In general, Browser-based client have learned to deal well with Unicode. However, there are some problems:

1. On non-Windows-systems, some users have reported that single characters are displayed as boxes. The patter seems to be erratic.
2. On Windows systems, sometimes single characters are displayed as boxes. Installing the "APL385 Unicode" font has fixed that problem.
3. On Internet Explorer 6 and earlier, endless problems got reported. There is only one solution to the problem: choose a reliable browser.
4. Internet Explorer 7 is fine in 98% of the cases. However, on some systems is simply does not work, and nobody could figure out what is causing this problem.

GoogleMail

1. Looking at your account, click on "Setting" in the top-right corner
2. On the "General" tab, scroll to the bottom
3. Make sure that "Use Unicode (UTF-8) encoding for outgoing messages" is ticked

That's it. Works pretty well, there are no known problems.

If you encounter a problem, it is likely to be one of the problem listed above under "Browsers"

Hotmail

Yahoo

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

CategoryGeneralHowTo