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#1 |
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Triple-A Player
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 122
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How to change Apple Mail's text encoding?
I have a Japanese friend, and I know enough Japanese to write some things to her from time to time. She uses Hotmail, which in her computer, in Japan, defaults to rendering web pages with Japanese Shift-JIS text encoding.
When I write messages using Apple Mail, in menu Message/Text encoding... I have several to text encodings to choose from, but actually only "Default" or "Unicode" suit outgoing messages with Japanese characters on them (because "default" in that case default to Unicode). There is no option to encode them using Shift-JIS, not one that I could find at least. The problem is that Hotmail in Internet Explorer FOR WINDOWS will ignore the fact that my messages are written using Unicode and will try to render them as if they were encoded using Shift-JIS, which will result in garbled text. But IE for Win will also ignore the user's explicit order to change text rendering to Unicode encoding in a particular message of Hotmail (by going to menu View/Encoding/UTF-8). So basically, there seems to be no way for her to tell her browser to display my messages using Unicode, and there also seems to be no way for me to send messages with Shift-JIS encoding. Does anyone know if there is indeed a way to send messages using Shift-JIS? |
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#2 |
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MVP
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Cumbria, UK
Posts: 2,461
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Not really a solution but if you can reach your email box through the web, you could try composing a message there.
Safari will use Shift-JIS, and I was able to type in Japanese characters to compose a message on .Mac. |
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#3 |
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All Star
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 759
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elmimmo,
If you want to have all of a language's encodings available to you in Safari and Mail App, you need to add that language in the International pane in System Preferences. Simply drag it below English, or whatever language may be your first. Just adding the language to your Input Menu is not enough. I hope this solves your problem. |
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#4 |
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Triple-A Player
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 122
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It worked like a charm! I added Japanese in the International prefpane and all its compatible encodings appeared in the drop down menu! Where did you learn that. Did I look for it in the wrong Help pages?
Apple should really include your hint in Mail's Help menu. In fact, macosxhints.com should add a hint describing this! I am going to submit one right away, crediting you in this thread of course (unless you either want me not to credit you or you prefer to submit it yourself). Thanks! |
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#5 |
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All Star
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 759
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I think I figured it out when I noticed I was missing encoding options on my newly purchased iBook that had been on my PowerMac as long as I could remember. When I compared the two I eventually looked at the International pane, and realized that was the problem.
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#6 |
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Major Leaguer
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Renmark, in the Riverland of South Australia
Posts: 322
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Pursuant to this, guys, does Mail default to the correct encoding when you input using a Unicode keyboard? I've found when I input using my Vietnamese Unicode keyboard (default OSX install), and don't choose Unicode manually from the View->Text Encodings menu, then it doesn't go as Unicode.
I, too, have friends in Asia who have been taken over by the M$ thingummy, and they have no trouble viewing my mail if I choose Unicode manually, but as I said, without that they get garbage. Also, when I receive Unicode mail, again I have to choose Unicode manually, to be able to view it. Is it possible to set Mail's default text encoding? It's such a hassle choosing Unicode manually all day. I tried other mailers, but I really prefer Mail. Thanks for any suggestions. from Clytie, whose View menu needs retreading
__________________
from Clytie MacBook Pro 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM, OSX latest, iPhone 4 |
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#7 |
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Triple-A Player
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 122
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Well, my experience is only using Spanish Mail with Spanish keyboard and trying to get Japanese messages out of my computer. Before adding Japanese to the International prefpane I only had Spanish and English, and left Mail's character encoding set to default, and I have not tried yet what Mail does with the new congig.
Before changing the prefs, If I limited myself to writing Spanish characters (which include accented roman vowels among other non-English characters), Mail's default behaviour would be to encode the outgoing message in ISO-8859-1 (a.k.a Latin-1, usually used for some western european languages, i.e. exactly the proper choice in that case), and if I typed Japanese characters it would go out as Unicode UTF-8, also by default with no interaction needed. To know which encoding Mail used when you had "default encoding" selected, go to your sent messages, open the one to be inspected, save a copy in your Desktop as "Source message without format" and, opening them in TextEdit, one of the headers will say "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8..." or "Content-Type: text/plain; charset= ISO-8859-1". My problem was that my Japanese friend's Hotmail defaulted NOT to Unicode, but to Shift-JIS and she could NOT change it to Unicode. About receiving mails, I cannot help you. So far I know I have received messages in ISO-8859-1, Unicode, Shift-JIS and ISO-2022-JP, and I have been able to read them perfectly without telling Mail which encoding to use. Confirm that, when you expected Mail to display messages as Unicode and it did not, those messages were indeed tagged as Unicode in their source (saving them as source and opening them in text edit). That is probably what Mail uses to know which encoding it should display automatically. If they are not tagged as such in any header, then it is your friend's mail agent fault and Mail is just defaulting to whatever it considers as default in a Vietnamese system, which seems not to be Unicode. Last edited by elmimmo; 09-09-2004 at 04:25 AM. |
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#8 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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All Star
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 759
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Well, whenever I switch to Arabic while composing a message Mail app changes the encoding (according to what I see in the message headers) to Unicode (more precisely, ISO-8859-6-i). English messages are sent as US-ASCII. If you've already followed this thread's previous advice and added Vietnamese to your International pane then it could very well be something you want to write Apple about (I wrote them a number of complaints about Arabic support in the Puma and Jaguar days -- they seemed to listen). Also you might want to seek help from the Apple discussion boards; some of the least likely people there had extensive knowledge of all of OS X's international quirks. If you didn't add Vietnamese to your International pane, then try it and see what happens. As far as changing the default encoding in mail, I don't know of a way to do this. This is a feature request you might want to send Apple's way. My problem is that the majority of my friends are using Outlook Express, and OE isn't intelligent enough to switch its encoding automatically to ISO-8859-6-i, or as OE calls it 'Arabic - ISO'. That means if I fail to encode my message as 'Arabic - Windows,' the receiver (if using OE) is forced to manually change the encoding to 'Arabic - ISO.' It's really not a big deal, since OE treats mail from Yahoo and Hotmail the same way, and most by default change the encoding of a message to 'Arabic - ISO' when unreadable. Nonetheless, it's still annoying.
I have to do this as well any time I receive an Arabic E-Mail from a Yahoo or Hotmail user. Pretty much standard. Webmail composers like the ones Yahoo and Hotmail use are often too generic to deal with encodings other than English. This is really not even a Mac issue, it's an issue of people not adhering to standards. I took a day once to just experiment with sending unicode mail from my Mac. I sent a number of messages and viewed them from various webmail clients (Hotmail, Yahoo!, others), Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and maybe even Outlook, just to get a feel for how each client handles Unicode messages. Not only did I send these from Mail app, but I also sent them from Thunderbird. I only suggest doing this because Arabic probably has quirks that Japanese or Vietnamese doesn't, and vice-versa. On top of that you have to account for techno-cultural variations. For example, in some countries you have a huge number of people using Hotmail, or using some other local E-Mail provider. It seems that when dealing with non-English languages you always encounter quirks, but at least you can take some steps to reduce them.
You don't even need to do that much. Just click the message in question, go to 'view,' then 'message,' and then 'raw source.'One last hint. A friend asked me how he could compose Arabic E-Mails with Yahoo! on his Mac. Yahoo, like many other web clients, mangles Unicode text to no end. The solution is to use this program. For instructions on how to use it exactly see this hint. This also works well if you want to write in Unicode on message boards such as this one (vBulletin, UBB, whatever). |
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#9 |
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Major Leaguer
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Renmark, in the Riverland of South Australia
Posts: 322
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Thanks heaps for the responses, and helpful suggestions, guys. I hadn't thought that it might be the other end ... I thought I wasn't encoding properly!
Yes, I do have Vietnamese selected in my International Prefs, and I also installed an additional Vietnamese pkg, with other fonts etc. which gives me other choices, but Unicode is what I want. I now understand a bit more about the issues, and I'll follow your recommendations. The Content headers can show a wild variety of encodings, depending on mail app. And yes, it is Yahoo and OE at the other end. Sad, for a country that's fought so hard for thousands of years for its independence, to be taken over without knowing it, by M$. ![]() My friends there envy me enormously for having a Mac. One lady said she'd seen one once, but never touched one. from Clytie, happy Mac user
__________________
from Clytie MacBook Pro 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM, OSX latest, iPhone 4 |
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#10 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Prospect
Join Date: Jan 2002
Posts: 7
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Per Apple doc #301986, you can set default encoding by entering:
Code:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "ISO-2022-JP" Default for 10.4 is, unfortunately, set to UTF.
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