FOM: non-ASCII characters

[Stephen G Simpson]

Dear Harvey,

Regarding your FOM message #88, Boolean Relation Theory 6/8/00
10:40AM, you said:

 > For some reason, in the FOM archives, at several places the letter
 > 
 > S
 > 
 > appears where there should be
 > 
 > ...
 > 
 > This didn't happen in the version I was sent as an FOM subscriber.

In your original message, you used a non-ASCII character, octal 212.
Evidently this character stands for three dots (...) according to the
character set used by your mail software.

The proliferation of non-standard character sets causes considerable
confusion, and Internet software cannot always deal with them
properly.  In this case, it appears that our mailing list software
(majordomo) simply passed your octal 212 through to the FOM mailing
list, while our HTML conversion software (mhonarc, used to create the
archive at http://www.math.psu.edu/simpson/fom/postings/) converted it
to S.

You can avoid problems of this kind by sticking to 100 percent plain
ASCII.

-- Steve Simpson
FOM moderator
http://www.math.psu.edu/simpson/fom/