3.13 misc.jobs Posting Guidelines: What about character sets?
Description
This article is from the Jobs FAQ, by Snoopy snoopy-at-sopwith.uucp.
3.13 misc.jobs Posting Guidelines: What about character sets?
This is a problem. Usenet is an international network, but there
are many limitations which prevent displaying arbitrary images
to the reader. Limit your posting to 7 bit ASCII. Do not use
fancy escape sequences that do "nice" things on your screen, since
they may put someone else's terminal into an unusable mode. Keep
lines shorter than 80 characters. Do not assume that your software
does this for you. Also remember that the reader's display probably
shows a different number of lines than yours does. Do not include a
"control-m" at the end of lines. Avoid using large quantities of
ALL CAPS. Normal usage of upper and lower case text is easier to
read and is perceived as "friendlier" by most people. Using all
upper case is perceived as unfriendly shouting.
If you need to display images that ASCII cannot handle, I recommend
a page description language such as PostScript, which can describe
any image by encoding it into ASCII (which can be transmitted over
the net and will not confuse terminals). Realize that the reader
will need a suitable previewer (e.g. Ghostscript, available at many
ftp sites) or printer to read your posting, and that it is more
trouble for them, tempting them to skip your article unread.
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