Each email job that is created in LISTSERV Maestro has a character set (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 email messages unless the administrator has defined a different default setting.
To define the default charset, edit the following in the Maestro User Interface INI-file:
[maestro_install_folder]/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 9 Supported Charsets
|
Charset Name: |
Description: |
|
US-ASCII |
US ASCII |
|
ISO-8859-1 |
West European, Latin 1 |
|
ISO-8859-2 |
East European, Latin 2 |
|
ISO-8859-3 |
South European, Latin 3 |
|
ISO-8859-4 |
North European, Latin 4 |
|
ISO-8859-5 |
Cyrillic |
|
ISO-8859-6 |
Arabic |
|
ISO-8859-7 |
Greek |
|
ISO-8859-8 |
Hebrew |
|
ISO-8859-9 |
Turkish, Latin 5 |
|
ISO-8859-15 |
Similar as ISO-8859-1 but with Euro currency symbol |
|
UTF-8 |
International Unicode, encoded in UTF-8 format |
|
GB2312 |
Simplified Chinese (GB2312) |
|
BIG5 |
Traditional Chinese (BIG5) |
|
ISO-2022-JP |
Japanese (ISO-2022-JP) |
|
X-EUC-JP |
Japanese (X-EUC-JP) |
|
X-SJIS |
Japanese (X-SJIS) |
|
KSC_5601 |
Korean (KSC_5601) |
|
EUC-KR |
Korean (EUC-KR) |
|
AUTO-NO-UTF-8 |
LISTSERV Maestro will choose either US-ASCII or any of the ISO-8859 charsets (but not UTF-8), depending on the characters that are actually used in the content. If possible, ASCII is favored over any ISO-8859, so an ISO-8859 set is only chosen if ASCII is not able to display all characters in the content. Of the ISO-8859 sets, the one where the number of non-displayable characters is minimized is chosen. If two sets have an equal number of non-displayable characters, then lower ISO-8859 sets are favored over higher sets (for example, ISO-8859-1 over ISO-8859-2, over ISO-8859-3, and so on). |
|
AUTO-YES-UTF-8 |
LISTSERV Maestro will choose either US-ASCII or any of the ISO-8859 or even UTF-8, depending on the characters that are actually used in the content. If possible, ASCII is favored over any ISO-8859 and the ISO-8859 sets are favored over UTF-8. The step to the next “higher” set is only made if the “lower” set is not able to display all characters in the content. If several ISO-8859 sets are able to display all characters, then lower ISO-8859 sets are favored over higher sets (for example ISO-8859-1 over ISO-8859-2, over ISO-8859-3, and so on.). |
The default charset is only initially assigned to the email job. Users may change the default charset on the Define Content screen.
If the administrator wants to prevent the users from changing the default charset (and force the users to always accept the default charset already set), another entry in the same INI-file needs to be edited:
· Edit or add the key AllowCharsetChoice. Set to true, allowing 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.
Of the ISO-8859 charset family, two charsets 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 email 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 outside 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:
[maestro_install_folder]/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 the default).
This INI-file setting will affect all mail sent, with any user account. Please note that changing this setting requires a restart of the Maestro User Interface component to take effect.