🚀 go-pugleaf

I am looking for a standard for representing diacritical
letters. I have used this legend for some time:

In order to avoid problems when sending ASCII text by email,
it is necessary to use some convention for diacritical
letters (with accents etc, i.e. all letters beyond ASCII
126), and if we wish to represent italics or bold type.
There is no formal standard convention for this, but I 
often use this common and simple one (to be expanded of 
course, when needed):  

 Legend:  a' = a acute
          e` = e grave
          n~ = n tilde
          o^ = o circumflex
          o: = o diaeresis (Umlaut; dots)
          c, = c cedilla
          etc.

          _some words_  = some words (in italics)
          *other words* = other words (bold type)

It is of course important to treat ALL diacritical letters
used (i acute, o acute, u acute -- VERY common in Spanish!).

Thus a search/replace operation should me made BEFORE saving
in ASCII format, and sending. The receiver can then do a
reversed search/replace to put accents back.  

However, there is a problem with this legend, as c, can be
misunderstood in a text as just missing the space -- and o: 
could sometimes really be an o with a following colon!

Any good suggestions?

 +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
 | Robin Cheesman                                Communication Studies |
 | Roskilde University  *  PO Box 260  *  DK-4000 Roskilde  *  Denmark |
 | Phone: +45 46757711    Fax: +45 46755313    Internet:  robin@ruc.dk |
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