[Baren]: The mailing list / discussion forum for woodblock printmaking.

Baren Digest             Tuesday, 10 February 1998     Volume 02 : Number 065

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Dan Wasserman <dwasser@slam.org>
Date: Mon, 09 Feb 1998 09:11:13 -0800
Subject: [Baren 363] white 

All:

Re: Roy on white... can any of you experts expand on the issue of
_blind_ embossing in the open areas of the print. Dave does it
wonderfully and I have seen it as a treatment for clouds etc. in Nihonga
painting.

~dan

------------------------------

From: julio.rodriguez@walgreens.com
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 11:12:34 -0600
Subject: [Baren 364] Mr. Iwano, email problems 

 Dave; you wrote:
> My most recent orders
>have been from the man considered the absolute top papermaker in the
>country for printmaking papers - Mr. Ichibei Iwano.  He is one of those
>few people who have been recognized as a 'Living National Treasure'. 
>This guy is good - very very good.

I got a book that says that Mr. Iwano from Fukui Prefecture  passed away in 
1976....he was awarded the "Living National Treasure" honor back in 1968.   Are 
you talking about his son or just the shop he used to work at ?  This book has 
a whole chapter & great pictures on Mr. Iwano making paper.

Daniel wrote:
>.....but do you know our posts include these aweful junk
>charecters in them?  Are you using a mail form?  If so the form needs to
>be set with _encoding=text/plain_ or some such to clean up your mail...
>could you look into what would be required to send cleaner mail.  

I was not aware I was sending out junk. I usually cut & paste from emails 
received and insert the ">" character in front of each line. I am using Lotus 
Notes on an IBM pc, probably thru a firewall.....is everybody getting junk from 
me ?
Can you help me out ?

Julio

------------------------------

From: Ray Esposito <brassring@brassring.org>
Date: Sun, 08 Feb 1998 16:35:33 -0500
Subject: [Baren 365] Re: white 

Dan wrote:
> Re: Roy on white... can any of you experts expand on the issue of
>_blind_ embossing in the open areas of the print. 

What a great suggestion -  How How How!!!!!

Who's Roy?  :>)

Ray Esposito

------------------------------

From: David Bull <davebull@asahi-net.email.ne.jp>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 08:15:12 +0900
Subject: [Baren 366] "Junk" characters in email messages ... 

Administrative message ...  (completely non-woodblock related)

As those of you who subscribe to [Baren] in the digest version have been
aware for a long time now, messages in the digest are sometimes mixed
together with 'junk' characters, usually at the end of each line.

Here's a bit of explanation of why this happens, and of how we can maybe
help avoid it in future ...  (I'm going to copy/paste this next part
from a newsletter I receive that deals with 'net matters.)

*****

The short answer to why you sometimes see "=" symbols in 
the email is that although your mail reader, like most 
modern email programs, is MIME (Multipurpose Internet 
Mail Extensions) compliant, sometimes mail is forwarded 
by servers that strip out some of the information necessary 
to identify and decode the MIME content properly.

MIME formatted messages generally encode the text using 
quoted-printable (QP) encoding.  QP marks all 'soft'
line breaks with an = symbol followed by a carriage return. 
Soft line breaks occur when carriage returns are 
automatically inserted within paragraphs to keep line 
lengths less than 76 characters. The = symbols at the ends 
of lines are generally the most distinctive aspect of a 
QP-encoded message that has not been decoded.

(Some email programs, most notably Netscape 2.0, improperly 
display the decoded paragraphs as a single long line of text 
that never wraps.)

There are two reasons why QP encoding might remain visible 
in a received message. First, if you use a non-MIME compliant 
email program, it won't decode the QP encoding, so it will 
remain in the text. Second, if the necessary information 
that tells your email program to decode QP is missing, your 
email program won't know how to do the decoding.

In email, information about the message is generally 
maintained in a header line, and MIME messages insert at 
least one header to identify that they are MIME messages. 
It looks like this:

Mime-Version: 1.0

In addition, if the message is QP encoded, there will also 
be at least the following header:

Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable


Email programs need to know that a message is a MIME QP 
encoded message for a message to be properly decoded. If a 
message lacks the above headers, it won't be decoded.

Although mail servers are not supposed to remove headers, 
there are a few miscreants that monkey with the headers.  
Gateway servers are one, and another is mailing list servers. 
Mailing list servers are not simple mail servers. Not only 
do they forward messages, they also create digests of 
multiple messages. The digests are where the problem arises. 
In most digests, most of the headers for each individual 
message are removed. In particular, MIME headers generally 
bite the dust.

Since a digest can include both encoded and non-encoded 
messages, it is sent without QP headers and therefore 
won't be decoded. 

The only solution to this at present is to encourage members
of any given mailing list not to send QP encoded messages to 
the list.

*****

In the case of our [Baren] list, messages like this have been coming
from both of the two members who are on Compuserve (Gary and Pat), and
now more recently from Julio.  In the case of the Compuserve guys, I
suspect that it is their 'gateway' that might be causing the problem,
and if so, there isn't going to be much that they can do about this. 
But for Julio or anybody else who is sending e-mail using the
'quoted-printable' option selected, it would be better for us if you
switched it to 'text/plain'.  
              
Here's a header from a 'junk' containing message:
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable

Here's a header from a 'normal' message:
Content-transfer-encoding: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

If it turns out that these people have no control over the format of
their messages, then the rest of us will just have to live with this.  

For 'digest' readers who just can't stand to read these things - you
have two options: switch to a 'regular' subscription, or read [Baren] in
the archives version (I 'fix up' each digest every evening before
uploading it to the [Baren] home page).

Thanx for your patience with this 'junk mail' ...

Dave

------------------------------

From: Jean Eger <jeaneger@LanMinds.Com>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 00:53:56 -0800
Subject: [Baren 367] Re: Baren Digest V2 #64 

Dear Baren people,
Your comments have been very helpful!  I appreciate it that you have saved me  a lot
of time and trouble trying to squeeze four pieces of too-thin wood out of two pieces
of cherry.  Also your remarks about dealing with warped wood are insightful and
expert.   The Encyclopedia is an all-round admirable and impressive project which will
be extremely helpful to printmakers now and in the future!  Thanks for the interesting
messages.
Sincerely,
Jean Eger

------------------------------

From: David Bull <davebull@asahi-net.email.ne.jp>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 19:16:16 +0900
Subject: [Baren 368] Re: Mr. Iwano 

Julio wrote:
> I got a book that says that Mr. Iwano from Fukui 
> Prefecture  passed away in 1976....he was awarded 
> the "Living National Treasure" honor back in 1968.   
> Are you talking about his son or just the shop he 
> used to work at ?  This book has a whole chapter & 
> great pictures on Mr. Iwano making paper.

This is very interesting to hear.  The Mr. Iwano I know sounds to be in
his 70's or so (I haven't met him yet).  I guess the man in your book
must be his father ...

Or then again, maybe not ...  The same paper-making families have 
been living in that same little village (Otaki machi) for hundreds 
of years now, and there are an awful lot of people around there 
with the same names.  I learned a little bit about these when I first 
started buying paper from Yamaguchi-san there.

He had been introduced to me as Shojiro Yamaguchi, and that was 
the name that appeared on the first invoices I got from him.  He 
was at that time about 60 years old or so.  When my 100 poets 
project was just starting up, I decided to emboss the papermaker's 
name on each of the finished sheets, and called him up to check if 
this would be OK with him.  I spoke to his wife (as usual), and she 
didn't see any problem...  

They called me back a short time later, and said that they had been 
thinking about what I was planning to do ...  They asked me if I 
would use the name Kazuo Yamaguchi instead.  I of course agreed 
to whatever they wanted, but had to ask what was going on ...

It turned out that Shojiro was the name of the father (who had 
passed away a long time before this ...);  Kazuo was the name of 
the guy I had been dealing with.  He had continued using the father's 
name for all these years, as he hadn't felt ready to start using 
his own name yet.  My decision to start publicizing his name a bit 
more widely had finally given him the incentive to start using his 
own name - which appeared on the invoices from then on.

As I said, he was about 60 at the time of these events ...

So I'm quite curious to find out just who I'm dealing with at 
Iwano san's place.  I'll be visiting Mr. Iwano sometime this 
spring, to get to know him better and perhaps to write a story 
for the summer issue of my newsletter.  The name I've been 
using so far is 'Ichibei Iwano'.  Does this match anything in 
that book, Julio?

By the way, please tell me more about this book - title, 
publisher, etc.  I'd be interested in getting hold of a copy.

Thanx


Dave

P.S.  Recent update news:

I've finally put the final prints from last year's set of poets up on my
own web site ...
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~xs3d-bull/update/update_log.html

And I put a new page up on the Encyclopedia last night ...
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~xs3d-bull/baren/encyclopedia/updates.html

------------------------------

End of Baren Digest V2 #65
**************************