Re: TD 723 and 724: possible problem quoting non-ASCII symbols?

Hello, everyone, and thanks to Paul Erlich for calling attention in TD 724
to what may be a rather subtle kind of quoting glitch which apparently
caused at least one of my posts I assumed was basically plain ASCII to be
treated at least in nondigest mode as if it were an attachment with some
strange character set.

At least in my received version of TD 723, I saw that three of my replies
got through in Digest mode without any apparent problem. However, today I
saw a post here from Paul Erlich indicating some kind of problem in
nondigest mode which caused my posts (or at least one of them) to be
treated as attachments or the like, and I may have at least a guess as to
the nature of the problem.

Both to clarify my unsuspecting intentions in posting what I thought were
three innocent text messages composed as usual in GNU Emacs for DOS and
uploaded to my Internet shell account for posting through the Pine mail
program, _without attachments_ of course, and possibly to solve a mystery
which could possibly help avoid future problems, I would like to share my
guess as to what may have happened.

The one possible clue I noticed is that for some reason Pine's "sent-mail"
archive says that my first message appearing in TD 723 (723:6) is in an
"X-UNKNOWN" character set, although I composed it as plain ASCII in GNU
Emacs 19.31 for DOS and it appears as normal text both in Pine and in my
copy of TD 723, as far as I can tell.

My first reaction was to wonder: could special characters have infiltrated
the text during Z-modem transfer from DOS to my UNIX account, or in Pine
itself? If so, why now rather than before?

Then I remembered that I have quoted some of Paul Erlich's text from a
post in TD 719 in which he used a character outside of the standard ASCII
set which looked like an "o-acute" (used, e.g., in Spanish) on my display,
but which I guessed must be a "cents" sign in some non-MS-DOS 6.22
character set. At the time, I preferred not to change anything in quoted
text -- but I now wonder whether, if I had taken the liberty of changing
that o-acute to the word "cents," I might have averted the problem

As one test of this hypothesis, I will try posting the same message, but
with the "o-acute" character (as it appears on my display) in the quote
from Paul Erlich changed to the word "cents." If this revised post
succeeds without any complications in nondigest mode, then maybe we have
found the relevant variable.

Hopefully having made my intentions in TD 723 to post plain text messages
clear at least, and emphasizing that at this point I am only offering a
guess as to what may have happened, I express my regrets for the glitch,
whatever it was.

Most respectfully,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net