Subject: Re: Entering French Characters into Pine (Pico)????

From: [email-masked] (Ian Barnett)
Date: 1 Jun 1995 08:58:42 -0400

I was able to solve the problem of entering French characters by changing 
the pico source code. There is a range of characters (including most of 
the French characters) excluded from entry. I don't know why this range 
was excluded so I just allowed the entry of these characters. If any one 
wants to know how to do this email me and I will post the changes I made 
to the source to allow this.

Ian Barnett

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From: [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma)
Date: 3 Jun 1995 08:53:22 GMT

In a previous article, [email-masked] (Ian Barnett) says:

>was excluded so I just allowed the entry of these characters.

    If I recall (coming in late to this after a couple weeks off the
computer), you were using a PC Alt-key numeric sequence to enter your
character.  The code you used was outside the range of ISO 8859-1
printable fer'n language characters, being something like Alt-135
(ISO 8859 printable, that is, non-control, characters, are in the
range 160-255 decimal).  So the character you were typing was not a
Franch character as would be seen in the ISO 8859-1 character set, but
more likely the character as appears in a DOS code page.
    What you really want to do is to set up an ISO 8859-1 emulation
and use that to enter your characters, so they appear properly on the
displays which people are likely to use.  I had the same problem using
Mac NCSA telnet when I failed to change the character translation from
the Mac charset, where the German characters I was typing appeared in
the ISO 8859-1 control character range, and I got the error from Pine,
until I remembered and set ISO 8859-1 translation and then all went well.
    If your charset in your .pinerc is not ISO 8859-1 (that is, it is
MACINTOSH or CP850 or something comparable), then your solution works,
but be advised that the majority of displays capable of western European
characters support ISO 8859-1, and Pine does no translation from the
received charset to the display charset.

-- 
 Barry Bouwsma, Zürich, Switzerland: I Still Have No Life      <[email-masked]>
  ___________________________http://www.sci.tamucc.edu/~pmichaud/toast/
In a blindfolded taste test, 4 of 5 newsreaders could not tell the
difference between Spam and Velveeta...

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From: [email-masked] (Alan J Flavell)
Date: Tue, 30 May 1995 13:11:18 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>
Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]> writes:
 
>On 28 May 1995, Ian Barnett wrote:
>
>> Is it possible to enter French characters into pine messages? We are
>> using unix Pine/Pico with PCs acting as vt100 terminals. When in vi I can
>
>    If you can successfully generate what you want in vi, try composing
>your message with vi.  ...
 
That sounds fine to me.
 
But, it would be polite to check first with your recipients to make
sure that they can actually read the messages!
 
Even if they use PINE (and there are some people out there that
don't), it is not guaranteed that they have a terminal that
displays (or is correctly set up to display) characters in the
upper half of the 8-bit code table.
 
As the saying goes - "be pessimistic in what you send out, and
generous in interpreting what you receive".
 
regards