[Phys-L] representing Greek letters, math symbols, et cetera

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 07/27/2013 11:48 AM, David Bowman wrote:
> BTW, I switched the argument of the function from [theta] to x
> because I noticed on my last post that when I sent Unicode versions
> of Greek [theta] and [mu] they came back to me on the list garbled
> by being turned into gravely accented e and i respectively.  But the
> post in the archives seems to have the Greek characters unmolested.
> If anyone can tell me how to send Greek characters to the list
> without them being molested by the software I would appreciate it.

General debugging hints:

1) Consider the various possibilities; the problem could be in
  the mail reader, or the mail sender, or the transport chain or
  some combination of the above.

  Using a web browser to look at the archives is a good first step.

  Using a dissimilar mail reader to look at the message is another
  good step.  I can report that the message sent on 07/27/2013 07:09 AM
  arrived chez moi with Greek letters intact.

2) Look at the email headers (mime headers) of your message.  Search 
  for the content-type ... which should exist and which should specify 
  a charset.

  The aforementioned message arrived chez moi with a header calling for
  the ISO/IEC 8859-7 "Latin/Greek" codepage (aka charset).
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-7

3) Consider the possibility that the message was sent with *no* mime
  content-type or perhaps no charset specified at all, in which case 
  something in the transport chain might insert a default, which might 
  or might not be what you want, and (worse) might be irreproducible.

4) If in doubt, configure your mail-sender to use UTF-8.  This is pretty
  well supported nowadays.  Linux has supported unicode for eons, and 
  even the Beast of Redmond supports it now.  It's kinda hard to ship 
  anything to China without unicode support.

  The advantage of unicode over ISO/IEC 8859-7 is that unicode supports
  math symbols and operators -- such as integral, del, equiv, hbar --
  plus other non-Latin non-Greek entities.
       ∇ ∂ × ÷ ∫ ∧  ⟨↑|↓⟩   ≠ ≡ ≤ ≥ ≪≫ « » † ‡ © ∞  ℏ
       Жуковский == Zhukovsky
       Włodzimierz Kołos
 
5) If your mail software doesn't support UTF-8, replace it with something
  that does.  Thunderbird is nice to use.  It is free and widely supported.