This issue of special characters has been a problem for Fidonet in the past, but it has been solved by the Fidonet standard FSC 0054, so that you can now safely use special characters in Fidonet mail if your message editor supports FSC 0054. FSC 0054 basically works like this:
Every Fidonet editor that wants to be compatible with FSC 0054 must be delivered along with built-in or external character translation tables that tell the editor how it can convert text that contains special characters from one character set to another.
When composing a message using a FSC 0054 compliant editor, you have two choices: By default, the editor allows you to enter the full range of special characters that your computer supports, but when saving the message, the editor will use its character translation tables and convert your text into a 7 bit clean representation that can be displayed on all computers even if they don't support FSC 0054. For example, a German sharp s would be converted into double s, an e with accent would be converted into an e without accent, and so on. This is the maximum compatibility mode: It offers you the comfort of being able to write text just as you would in a letter, using all special characters that your language requries, but your mails will still be properly displayed on all computers.
The other (better) possibility is that your editor leaves the special characters that you typed in as is, but inserts a hidden kludge line, from here on referred to as the charset kludge, into the message, that designates which character set you have used for composing the message. When your message is read on another computer by a Fidonet message reader that also supports FSC 0054, the message reader will see the charset kludge in your mail and then use its charset translation tables to convert your message into the character set that this computer uses. The consequence is that even if your computer and the computer of the receiver use different character sets, everything that you typed in will look just the same on the receiver's screen than on yours, including all special characters that have been typed.
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.