Subject: Re: character set problems in pine 3.94

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 1996 10:50:54 -0400

On 21 Jun 1996, Herman Van Uytven wrote:

: When I use Pine 3.94 (or Pico) on Windows 3.11 with code page 850
: and in pinerc character-set=ISO-8859-1 there are problems with
: accented characters.  E.g. if I type small e acute accent on my
: keyboard (= E9 in ISO-8859-1), then I get upper case U acute accent
: which is E9 in CP850.
: 
: Do I need to work with ISO_TO_CP and CP_TO_ISO environment variables 
: and corresponding files (does that work) ?
: If so, has someone already composed them.

    The problem is with DOS code page 850.  That code page has all (or
nearly all) of the accented letters in the ISO-8859-1/Latin-1 character
set, BUT NOT IN THE SAME ORDER.  Therefore, if you type E9, you will
get what E9 corresponds to in code page 850, not what E9 corresponds to
in Latin-1.

    What you need is code page 819, which is a true Latin-1 character
set.  DOS code pages for all the ISO-8859-x character sets are
available from a university in Germany.  If you have a World Wide Web
browser, browse my home page (in my signature).  I have a link to that
site, from which you can get the appropriate DOS code pages with
documentation.  (If you do not have WWW access, send me an email, and
maybe we can work something out.)

    However, you say you are using Windows 3.11.  I use Windows very
little and am not an expert on it, but somehow I got the idea that
Windows uses ISO-8859-1 by default, rather than DOS code pages. 
However, I could be mistaken.  Anyway, code page 819 is a true DOS
Latin-1 character set.

Paul                             <[email-masked]>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key 
Home Page:  URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart

---

From: [email-masked] (Herman Van Uytven)
Date: 21 Jun 1996 13:02:11 GMT

Hello,

When I use Pine 3.94 (or Pico) on Windows 3.11 with code page 850
and in pinerc character-set=ISO-8859-1 there are problems with
accented characters.  E.g. if I type small e acute accent on my
keyboard (= E9 in ISO-8859-1), then I get upper case U acute accent
which is E9 in CP850.

Do I need to work with ISO_TO_CP and CP_TO_ISO environment variables 
and corresponding files (does that work) ?
If so, has someone already composed them.

Thanks in advance,

-Herman-

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From: kremžská HOŘČICE <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 1996 20:55:27 +0200

> When I use Pine 3.94 (or Pico) on Windows 3.11 with code page 850

    Hmmm.  You say you are using one of the Windows Pine versions
(pcp_w16.zip or pcp_w32.zip), but somehow you are using IBM Code Page 850,
which is a PC code page that does not see much use under Windoze?

    The usual code page which sees use in western European Windows is
1252, which is identical to ISO 8859-1 in those positions where ISO 8859-1
includes printing characters.  But if you are truly using CP850, but
labelling it in your configuration as iso-8859-1 then read on...

> If so, has someone already composed them.

    Well, yes, to do what you are wanting.  While DOS versions of PC-Pine
would gladly make use of these variables to perform translation from the
preferred over-the-wire MIME charsets to the DOS code pages (and in fact,
had code internally to perform the translation between the most common
charsets and code pages), the Windows version did not consult any
translation tables, until the most recent release (3.94) -- although I
have not personally verified that this release does indeed perform
properly with Windows translation tables.

    The reason why the Windows Pine never bothered with translation is
because CP1252 was close enough to ISO 8859-1.  Unfortunately, at least
one of the other Windoze code pages is sufficiently different from the
corresponding subset of ISO 8859 that it cannot be used with accented
characters.

    If you look in the Pine source code, you will see the tables which are
used internally for translation between the preferred MIME charsets and
the DOS code pages, which can be found in pine3.94/pine/osdep/codepage.dos
(a new location in 3.94), and you can steal from these to create the
environment tables.  Note that the format in the source code is slightly
different from what I have in the files here which are read for the
environment variables, and the desired format is documented in the tech
notes (or somewhere), so it's a simple matter of a quick conversion (I
think stripping out the commas will do it for you, but check to be sure). 

    The easiest thing, of course, under Windows, is to use CP1252, but you
should be able to use the ISO_TO_CP and vicey-versus with the latest Pine,
as users of Central European Windows and Pine will want to do to convert
CP1250 to the MIME charset ISO 8859-2 so that at last all characters will
be correct.  (I've been way overworked to be able to configure this
myself, sorry...)

Barry Bouwsma
<[email-masked]>

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From: Ray McAllister <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Jun 1996 01:41:12 -0400

Seems like a number of us are having hgelp printing email from pine. I
have to highlight it, one screen at a time and transfer it to a file
(usually A:) in from 2 to 10 chunks, then import into Word or Notepad to
print. Is there any way to highlight an entire message in one sweep so I
do not have to do incrementals? Thanks a million. The answer will probably
help a couple of other recent posters. Ciao

Ray McAllister, Prof (Emeritus) Ocean Eng., FAU, Boca Raton, FL 33064
Diving Dinosaur, Geologist/Oceanographer/Ocean Engineer, 44 years SCUBA
[email-masked] (954) 426-0808, Author Diving Locations, Boynton/Dania

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From: [email-masked] (Herman Van Uytven)
Date: 24 Jun 1996 12:22:45 GMT

The problem below seems to disappear aftre using Windows Config
and selecting a font and a font size.
So can I assume this is a bug (maybe some DOS code got triggered
as long as there in no font specified ?) ?
Which is the "official" address to send bug reports ?

> When I use Pine 3.94 (or Pico) on Windows 3.11 (with DOS code page 850)