Subject: Re: ISO-8859-1 translation on sunos

From: Edan Idzerda <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 02:18:52 -0400 (EDT)

> My problem is that much of hte world seems to be sending things in
> ISO-8859-1 charactert set rather than US-ASCII, and, many simple
> characters get mistranslated -- like the ' in Don't.  The pine technical

I got sick of people sending me those types of messages and
getting that error message from Pine.

If I recall correctly, I needed to enable using <locale.h>
in Pine, and then I was able to 

character-set=ISO-8859-1

in ~/.pinerc and it worked like a charm.  Maybe this won't solve
your problem, but mine works fine.  (SunOS 5, not 4, but I don't
know off the top of my head why that would matter.)  Any regular
xterm should be able to disable plenty of umlats and other funky
chars :)

- edan

---

From: "Adam H. Kerman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 10:35:34 -0500 (CDT)

>From: Edan Idzerda <[email-masked]>
>Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 02:18:52 -0400 (EDT)

>>My problem is that much of hte world seems to be sending things in ISO-8859-1
>>charactert set rather than US-ASCII, and, many simple characters get
>>mistranslated -- like the ' in Don't.

Ahem. The apostrophe is in the US-ASCII character set; therefore, it has the
same code in ISO-8859-1 and any other character set of which US-ASCII is a
subset.

>Any regular xterm should be able to disable plenty of umlats and other funky
>chars :)

Why bother to disable them when they can be displayed?

---

From: Edan Idzerda <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 11:48:07 -0400 (EDT)

> Why bother to disable them when they can be displayed?

Did I say that?  I meant to say "display."  Silly me.

Actually, if you know of way to disable characters in an xterm 
let me know.  ;)

I swear that I had to modify os.h or pine.c to get setlocale to 
work correctly.  But I could just be dillusional.
 
- edan

---

From: Arthur Snoke <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 15:09:56 -0400 (EDT)

I was the original sender of the lines below regarding the apostrophe
which did not come out right on my screen.  Let me give an explicit
example.

I have set my character-set to ISO-8859-1, which seems to affect only
outgoing mail, but becuase the lines I am including came with that
character set, I am guessing the whole message will be so encoded.  (I
find the help information on character-set a bit obtuse, but it definitely
does not change the appearance of incoming mail beyond getting rid of
that wonderful message -- which accurately describes the problem I am
trying to solve.)

Here is my example:
=================================================
Giordano Bruno was the last heretic consigned to the flames by the Roman
Inquisition, and with reason. His cosmology went far beyond Copernicus
in demoting the earth from a special place in god^Òs cosmos: he
anticipated the modern knowledge of a vast universe, with an infinite
number of suns like ours, with planets inhabited by beings like us.
================================================

In the third line "god's" comes out here with the apostrophe replaced by
^O with a ` over the O.  When I look at this in mailtool on the sun, I get
"god^=D2s". (There is some effect here from the inability of mailtool to
handle quoted printable encoding.)   When I print it, I get "gods". Yet
netscape seems to be able to handle it okay.  I am using an xterm window
on my sun.

One thing I truly like about PINE is the ability to use it from home using
telnet to my unix machine.  I have a mac with ncsa telnet and I use their
vtx100 screen with (I think) the ability to understand iso-8859-1.  In the
above message, it has "god^"s" for the word of interest.

I do not know if this is a "smart quote" and not really an apostrophe.

From before...

---

From: "Adam H. Kerman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 15:02:08 -0500 (CDT)

There's no need to send me a duplicate of what you send to the mailing list.

>From: Arthur Snoke <[email-masked]>
>Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 15:09:56 -0400 (EDT)

>I have set my character-set to ISO-8859-1, which seems to affect only outgoing
>mail, but becuase the lines I am including came with that character set, I am
>guessing the whole message will be so encoded.

Yes, that's correct. If you had only included 7-bit US-ASCII characters, it
would have been marked "US-ASCII" no matter what you set the character-set
option to.

>In the third line "god's" comes out here with the apostrophe replaced by ^O
>with a ` over the O. . . . I am using an xterm window on my sun.

>I do not know if this is a "smart quote" and not really an apostrophe.

I don't know what you mean by "smart quote". But, likely, you are correct that
in lieu of an apostrophe, the author used a lower-case o with an acute accent (a
right-hand accent) instead. Maybe he misspelled "god", sticking the "d" in
later, while the terminal thought it was meant to be a 2-stroke character?

I don't recall what European countries would use ISO-8859-1. I think the UK is
one of them.

---

From: "Robin S. Socha" <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 May 1998 01:11:15 +0200

> Arthur Snoke <[email-masked]> writes:

[blabla]
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from QUOTED-PRINTABLE to 8bit by franck.pc.Uni-Koeln.DE id VAA26920
[blabla]

Any further questions?

Robin

-- 
Robin S. Socha     Join the Fight: <http://www.enemy.org/>
Windows NT - if you're looking for an OS that goes down more often
than your girlfriend.