Subject: pine and

From: [email-masked] (Divine Intervention)
Date: 25 Nov 1994 18:19:53 GMT

does anyone know how i can write letters in pine using the pound sterling
sign because whenever i do it asks me whether i want to emergency exit.

cheers

divine intervention

---

From: [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma)
Date: 26 Nov 1994 04:58:34 GMT

>sign because whenever i do it asks me whether i want to emergency exit.

    First, you should set up Pine to indicate that the ISO-8859-1
character set is being used, else the messages will not be tagged
properly for display.  (There are other character set standards which
include the Pound Sterling, but the ISO-8859-1 is most widely used.)
In some environments, this is needed before Pine will accept any 8 bit
characters for text input.

    The Emergency Exit prompt you are seeing is caused by Pine seeing
the control-\ (^\) character.  So, apparently, however you are creating
your Pound Sterling character is either generating ^\ as a control
character, or maybe ^\ with bit 8 turned on (not sure about whether this
second possibility is also interpreted as emergency exit, however, if
your 8-bit characters are being stripped to 7 bits, this would also
be possible).

    The Pound Sterling character is an 8 bit character equivalent to the
US-ASCII character ``#'' (pound sign, octothorpe, whatever), but with
bit 8 turned on, when using the ISO-8859-1 (ISO Latin-1) character set.
You may have to somehow configure the communications program you use to
properly generate this character -- apparently you are getting the ^\
character instead.

    When your character set used in Pine is properly configured, and
the communications program you use generates codes corresponding to
the character set you select, you should have no difficulty generating
the Pound Sterling within Pine and using it in mail to MIME-aware
recipients.  Your current difficulties sound like a problem with the
configuration of the communications program you are using to type the
Pound Sterling character.

-- 
 Barry Bouwsma, back from Euro-bike-tour in Ann Arbor, Michigan
    Please direct mail to  <[email-masked]> (MIME-aware)
Unemployable System Crasher, seeking work with the Internet that will put me
somewhere near the Appenzell, Switzerland; have pivo and zmrzlina, will travel