Problems reading Spanish character set

[Leo Kerner]

I use outlook mail with word as the editor running on Windows XP. I have
a Spanish keyboard. If I go to Control Panel-> Date,
Time,Language,Regional Options-> Add Other Languages ->Languages-> Text
Services and Input Languages->Details I get the following settings:

Default Input Language: Spanish (traditional sort)
Installed Services-: ES Spanish (International Sort)
Advanced Text Services
lnk Correction
Keyboard
Spanish

Now, when I type, all is well. But if I send an email message to myself,
characters get changed... the opening question mark and explamation mark
become colsin marks, the "ñ" (n with tilde) becomes "n"

Anything else that I should set?

Thanks from
Leo

 

[Steven Marzuola (remove wax and invalid for reply)]

I use outlook mail with word as the editor running on Windows XP. I have
a Spanish keyboard. If I go to Control Panel-> Date,
Time,Language,Regional Options-> Add Other Languages ->Languages-> Text
Services and Input Languages->Details I get the following settings:

Default Input Language: Spanish (traditional sort)
Installed Services-: ES Spanish (International Sort)
Advanced Text Services
lnk Correction
Keyboard
Spanish

Now, when I type, all is well. But if I send an email message to myself,
characters get changed... the opening question mark and explamation mark
become colsin marks, the "ñ" (n with tilde) becomes "n"

Anything else that I should set?

I can't help you, but I would like to solve this too. Not in my mail,
but I have friends who write to me in Spanish and this often happens to
their emails. What's more, almost all accented characters get changed
to other letters.

P.S. What is a "colsin" mark? And I think you mean "exclamation
point", not "explamation mark". (¡!)

 

[Andreas Prilop]

Subject: Problems reading Spanish character set

Nobody expects the Spanish character set.
Use ISO-8859-1 instead.

I don't know Outlook - but in Outlook Express, you must first choose

Tools > Options > Send
Mail Sending Format > Plain Text Settings > Message format MIME
News Sending Format > Plain Text Settings > Message format MIME
Encode text using: None

before you can send any special, non-ASCII character with a
"charset" declaration. Perhaps there is a similar option in Outlook.

Default Input Language: Spanish (traditional sort)
Installed Services-: ES Spanish (International Sort)
Advanced Text Services
lnk Correction
Keyboard
Spanish

All this is irrelevant. Necessary is a charset declaration
"charset=ISO-8859-1" in your outgoing mail in order to transmit
any special characters such as "ñ".

 

[Leo Kerner]

In Outlook there is NO Send after Tools->Options.
The Spanish character set IS ascii, and a superset of the English
character set.
Too bad you couldn't help.
Leo

 

[Steven Marzuola (remove wax and invalid for reply)]

I use outlook mail with word as the editor running on Windows XP. I have
a Spanish keyboard. If I go to Control Panel-> Date,
Time,Language,Regional Options-> Add Other Languages ->Languages-> Text
Services and Input Languages->Details I get the following settings:

Default Input Language: Spanish (traditional sort)
Installed Services-: ES Spanish (International Sort)
Advanced Text Services
lnk Correction
Keyboard
Spanish

Now, when I type, all is well. But if I send an email message to myself,
characters get changed... the opening question mark and explamation mark
become colsin marks, the "ñ" (n with tilde) becomes "n"

Leo, just an idea, inspired by Andreas' posting. I have Outlook 2000,
maybe yours is different, but:

What are your settings under Tools / Options / Mail Format tab,
"Message format" section, "International Options",
"Use this encoding ..." (two boxes)?

Both of mine say "Western European (ISO)"

 

[Andreas Prilop]

Leo, just an idea, inspired by Andreas' posting. I have Outlook 2000,
maybe yours is different, but:

What are your settings under Tools / Options / Mail Format tab,
"Message format" section, "International Options",
"Use this encoding ..." (two boxes)?

Both of mine say "Western European (ISO)"

Excellent! Using your keywords, a quick search
http://www.google.com/search?q=Outlook+International.Options
leads me to
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010549341033.aspx

 

[Andreas Prilop]

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

The Spanish character set IS ascii, and a superset of the English
character set.

So ASCII means "American Spanish Code for Information Interchange"?
Funny! Last time when I looked at
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso646.html ,
ASCII was the "American Standard Code for Information Interchange"
and did not contain any special Spanish characters.

I suppose you and your newsreader mean ISO-8859-1,
which contains special letters like "ñ".
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/

 

[Leo Kerner]

Andreas, you are being sarcastic and not particularly helpful in dealing
with my problem.
http://www.lookuptables.com/ is my only references, and includes a
section entitled Extended ASCII Code that contains the usual Spanish
characters, Greek letters, and others as well.

Leo

 

[Leo Kerner]

Thanks. Mine are marked the same.
I should note that this problem surfaced recently... I have been using Spanish
for part of my emails for over two years without problems.
Cheers,
Leo

 

[Leo Kerner]

This is useful even if only as a reference. I have saved it. Thanks, Andreas.
Leo

 

[Michael \(michka\) Kaplan [MS]]

This is not really ASCII though.

One should not put too much stock in information on the web that is
inaccurate if one can help it....

(not being sarcastic, just trying to be frank)


--
MichKa [Microsoft]
NLS Collation/Locale/Keyboard Technical Lead
Globalization Infrastructure, Fonts, and Tools
Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap

This posting is provided "AS IS" with
no warranties, and confers no rights.

Andreas, you are being sarcastic and not particularly helpful in dealing
with my problem.
http://www.lookuptables.com/ is my only references, and includes a
section entitled Extended ASCII Code that contains the usual Spanish
characters, Greek letters, and others as well.

Leo

 

[Steven Marzuola (remove wax and invalid for reply)]

Excellent! Using your keywords, a quick search
http://www.google.com/search?q=Outlook+International.Options
leads me to
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010549341033.aspx

Aha! That worked. I had to wait a couple of days until someone sent me
a message with this problem. The header said this:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

and in the body, the word "retención" was displayed as "retencisn"

However, while viewing the open message, I clicked View / Encoding and
switched to Western European (ISO). Then the accented characters were
displayed properly.

I would rather have this setting applied automatically to all emails by
default, but this method will do. Thanks.

 

[Andreas Prilop]

http://www.lookuptables.com/ is my only references, and includes a
section entitled Extended ASCII Code that contains the usual Spanish
characters, Greek letters, and others as well.

99% of the web is crap. And this web site is an example.
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange as defined in
ANSI X3.4 has only 128 characters and does not contain any special
Spanish (or German, French ...) letters. There is no such thing as
"Extended ASCII". I've already pointed you to
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso646.html
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html
which is excellent reference.