Subject: how to set charset parameter?

From: [email-masked] (Nelson Chin)
Date: 10 Dec 1994 23:46:52 GMT

how do you suppose to set the charset parameter in pine? for both
posting and mailing,.. i wish the header section can be as modifable
as the body text, just like in tin.

Nelson

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From: [email-masked] (Nelson Chin)
Date: 10 Dec 1994 23:54:37 GMT

Nelson Chin ([email-masked]) wrote:
: how do you suppose to set the charset parameter in pine? for both
: posting and mailing,.. i wish the header section can be as modifable
: as the body text, just like in tin.
: Nelson
i forgot to mention that i am interseted in setting to another 7-bit
charset, since i believe the default character setting in pine's setup
is only invoked when the text is 8-bit.  

nelson
--
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From: [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma)
Date: 11 Dec 1994 01:52:39 GMT

>is only invoked when the text is 8-bit.  

    This is a problem; whereas old Pines (like 3.07) would tag all text with
the selected charset whether 7 or 8-bit, if it were not one of a limited
set (ISO-8859-* and such), permitting one to use charset=EBCDIC-US with
7-bit mail, the more recent Pines will assume you are using a MIME charset
which is a superset of US-ASCII, and label the text with  the lowest
possible charset, meaning ASCII if only 7-bit text is included.
    Note  that the permitted MIME charsets are listed in the latest Assigned
Numbers RFC, which I believe is RFC 1700 (even I haven't browsed this yet),
but to my knowledge, all the charsets listed in RFC 1345 are allowed, while
perhaps not recommended.  This does include a number of charsets which are
decidedly not supersets of US-ASCII.
    If your desired character set is not listed, you should use a non-
standard character set with a prefix of ``X-'' as in
charset=X-I-HAVE-NO-IDEA
or else work to getting your charset registered if you feel a need.

    But the problem is that Pine assumes that if you have no characters
outside the range of ASCII (>127 decimal), that your message is equivalent
to US-ASCII, to permit use of  charsets  Pine doesn't know  of, without
unnecessarily tagging ASCII as something else (read the MIME RFC).

    Perhaps the option could be provided for expert users that the given
charset value is not a superset of US-ASCII, which then tags  all messages
with the value provided, which would then correctly tag messages you would
be sending, as well as permit  proper tagging of West European variants of
ASCII,  which assign other characters to the positions occupied by { and \
and } and the like in US-ASCII (yeah, that's a poor example, since all the
characters would be included in ISO-8859-1, but I'm sure there will still
be those who can't quite upgrade their terminals immediately, and for whom
such tagging would be useful, if the recipient has a MIME reader capable
of doing translation from the charset in transport to the display charset).

    The short answer is, as far as I can tell, Pine will always give a
message consisting of only 7-bit data the charset tagging of US-ASCII in
the recent releases, but I can see it being useful to allow the user to
choose to apply a different tagging to 7-bit data.

-- 
 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