Section 18
Using International Character Sets

Each e-mail job that is created in LISTSERV® Maestro has a charset associated with its content. This charset is used to encode the content for sending. When a job is first created as a new job (not as a copy of an existing job), the job is initially created with the default charset. LISTSERV Maestro defaults to the ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) character set for encoding e-mail messages unless a different default setting has been defined by the administrator.

18.1 Defining the Default Mail Charset

To define the default charset, edit the following in the Maestro User Interface INI-file:

\Program Files\L-Soft\Application Server\lui\lui.ini

Edit or add the key "DefaultMailCharset" and set it to the name of one of the charsets supported by LISTSERV Maestro:

Table 6 Supported Charsets

The default charset is only initially assigned to the e-mail job; it may be changed by the user on the content definition page.

If the administrator wants to stop the users from changing the default charset (that is to force the users to always accept the default charset that the administrator has already selected), another entry in the same INI-file needs to be edited:

Edit or add the key "AllowCharsetChoice". Set to "true" to allow the users to change the charset of a job (to be able to assign different charsets to each job) or to "false" to disallow changing of the charset. The default if the key is not present in the INI-file is "true."

18.2 Allowing or Disallowing Bi-Directional Character Sets

Of the ISO-8859 charset family, there are two charsets that contain letters from languages that have a standard reading direction of right-to-left. These are the charsets ISO-8859-6 (Arabic) and ISO8-859-8 (Hebrew), both of which are supported by LISTSERV Maestro.

Actually, LISTSERV Maestro will not use the charsets with the names ISO-8859-6 and ISO-8859-8 when it recognizes Arabic or Hebrew characters, but will instead use the special bi-directional versions ISO-8859-6-i and ISO-8859-8-i. These charsets contain the same characters as their non-i-suffix counterparts, but the "-i" suffix tells the receiving mail client that the text should be displayed with right-to-left reading direction.

Without the "-i" suffix in the charset name, many e-mail clients would probably display the correct characters, but in the (for that language) incorrect left-to-right reading direction. Even with the "-i" suffix, the recipient might need a special mail client version (or even a special mail client) that is prepared to display text with right-to-left reading direction properly and is also able to properly display bi-directional text (text that mixes characters with left-to-right and characters with right-to-left reading direction, in the case of a Hebrew text that contains English names, for example). Some clients may only display the characters with the right direction, but still left-align each line of text, instead of the correct right-alignment (occurrences such as this are subject to the mail client itself, and are out of the scope of LISTSERV Maestro).

It is possible, however, to disallow the charsets with the "-i" suffix and use the "normal" counterparts, ISO-8859-6 and ISO-8859-8 instead. To do so, edit the following file:

\Program Files\L-Soft\Application Server\lui\lui.ini

Edit or add the key "AllowISO-i-Mails=false" to disallow the bi-directional charsets. (If the key from the INI-file is removed, commented out, or set to "…=true", then the bi-directional charsets will be allowed as is the default).

This INI-file setting will affect all mail sent, with any user account. Changing this setting requires a restart of the Maestro User Interface component to take effect.