Re: [exim] character set distortion?

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Author: Phil Pennock
Date:  
To: jean-paul natola
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] character set distortion?
On 2009-09-01 at 12:37 -0400, jean-paul natola wrote:
> I was wondering how to fix this issue- our designer sends us a file, i open it and there is distortion- he says it looked fine when they sent it- he said make sure i'm using UTF-8
>
> as that is the way he made it (its an htm page)
>
>
>
> so the only thing I can conclude is that exim maybe garbling it?


No.

Exim is 8-bit clean. (Exim does not, however, advertise 8BITMIME
because it does not do conversion when talking to mail-systems that are
not 8-bit clean.) The original file will probably have been sent with a
Content-Transfer-Encoding of quoted-printable or base64, rendering this
irrelevant.

You have provided almost no details of your setup, besides that Exim is
involved somewhere. You don't say what mail-clients you're using, what
the routing is, what OSes are in use, or anything which would help us to
help you. You're posting from a webmail system, which again provides us
no opportunity to debug.

But I *very* much doubt that Exim is the source of your problem. You
could try setting out to make sure that you have a set-up which handles
UTF-8 cleanly for display; even today, this is not always a default.

This is what I suspect the designer meant -- make sure that you are
using a desktop setup capable of handling and displaying UTF-8.

If you're using a Unix system of some kind (Linux counts) then you
should start reading the FAQ written by Markus Kuhn, available at:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
which will provide you the background to understand what's going on and
provide you links to other resources, to test data, and more.

Regards,
-Phil