Author: Ted Roche
Posted: 2015-07-18 at 15:38:05
On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Ken Dibble <krdibble@stny.rr.com> wrote:
>
> For some definition of "fine" and some definition of "plain text".
>
> All email is encoded in some fashion.
>
> If you use a device or a service that inserts UTF-8 or some other
> double-byte encoding, or HTML-like punctuation escape codes, into the email,
> then you don't get "plain text" when you try to read the message. And
> complaints about this get the response, "You should use a modern email
> program", while suggestions that the sender should use a
> plain-text-compliant email program are chuckled over and deemed "quaint", or
> perhaps some other less amusing term.
You're talking to the guy who coined "SMTP Good, MAPI Bad" meme. I
like plain text email. Pretty email is useful for marketing and
advertisers, less so for technical and person-to-person
communications.
Well, we are getting far afield from the point of discussion, but I'll
take the bait about what "plain text" means :)
ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is
neither American (unless you think American Telephone & Telegraph
rather than the US of A), based on telegraphy, going back to Baudot
code, neither a Standard (it was a proprietary replacement for EBCDIC,
trying to thwart IBM, which some might argue is "plain text" ) The
Windows equivalent, ANSI, was not at the time actually an American
National Standards Institute standard, though it is now, with all the
horrors of character sets, sorting rules and code pages. Everybody had
their own "Extended ASCII" as the base 128 characters were defined
and the second 128 were proprietary to each extension (WANG ASCII had
cooler characters. I build an excellent version of Star Trek on in, in
WANG BASIC.) Microsoft "solved" the problem of 8-bit ANSI with MBCS
Mult-Byte Character Sets, which was decanting a can of worms into a
bigger and more complicated can. Genius!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
If I was feeling sporting, I'd argue that Unicode is plain text. It is
a standard (or set of standards) and text can be read and interchanged
on Windows, DOS, Macs, Linuxes, big- and little-endian, ARM
processors, phones, tablets and pretty much all "modern" devices. It
has well-documented flags for encoding and IS an open standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
It is "plain" in the sense that it doesn't include underlines or
colors or blinking or italics, but it does make it easy to say ℉, €, ℃
-- that's Fahrenheit, Euro or Centigrade, in case your email client
can't read them :)
Or おじいちゃん (Ojīchan) Grandpa -- Ed's new name!
But others would argue that (as Wikipedia distinguishes) RTF is a
document format while Unicode/ASCII/ANSI are character encodings.
That's likely true
I was surprised you didn't just post a TXT file.
> I am surprised to learn that RTF is a Microsoft proprietary format. It is an
> "open" format, and that's probably what confused me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format
Microsoft? Yes. Open: No.
> My encryption system can generate results that contain "unprintable" (in the
> technical sense, not referring to the kinds of words I sometimes use in
> response to relentless and mindless technological churn) characters that
> reside at the low end of the ASCII table.
We often call these "binary" even though that is utter nonsense. In a
computer, it's all binary.
> .doc file. I did find that I can parse them correctly out of an RTF file
> FILETOSTR-ed, and my parsing code handles a couple of different RTF
> "standards", so that's what I use for that.
>
> The RTF I posted to my website was created using the version of WordPad that
> comes with Win XP.
>
> I don't know anyone who can't still pretty easily read an RTF file,
> including people using OpenOffice on a Linux box. Unlike PDF, it is
> accessible to blind people using screen readers. (No, Adobe's
> "accessibility" features don't always work, and most people don't know how
> to correctly OCR text being scanned into a PDF, and they get actively
> irritated when asked to learn). To my mind, therefore, RTF is a better
> universal standard for formatted text than PDF, and certainly far better
> than .doc (which most people don't know how, or can't be bothered (see
> "irritated", above), to generate from their .docx-default versions of
> Office).
Good observations.
> However I do see that the RTF generated by FRX2Any is readable in Word 2010
> but not in the Wordpad that comes with Windows 7.
Well, you will be shocked to discover that Windows appears to have
abandoned the RTF "standard" (last updated in 2008) so perhaps they've
brought it back in-house for new and improved versions. The people who
brought us "Embrace, Enhance, Extend and Extinguish" -- what could go
wrong?
7-bit ASCII worked fine for me on CompuServe at $22.95 a month dialup.
These kids with their new-fangled line-and-box characters,bah! And get
off my lawn!
> I knew a highly-skilled and experienced computer programmer who lived
> full-time in a cabin whose only electricity was supplied by a single light
> socket dangling from his bedroom ceiling.
There's something to a simple lifestyle, although that's a bit too
ascetic and spartan for me.
--
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
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