Subject: Re: Unicode in pine

From: Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 09:27:40 +0000

Almost a year ago someone wrote:

>  I think that we need version of pine which supports Unicode.
> I mean if we use terminal which displays Unicode translated glyphs in UTF8
> for example then pine could use this kind of terminal and properly display
> multilingual mail.

I agree.

Linux's console works for displaying UTF-8, so you can make full
use of 512-character fonts. Unfortunately lynx is the only program
I've found that can make use of this facility ...

It would be good if I could use PINE on the console for reading
and writing e-mail in Unicode.

Anyway, wasn't there a declaration by some standards body that any
MUA written or updated after some date should be considered deficient
if it can't handle UTF-8?

Edmund

PS. If you have a recent Linux distributation you might be able to
demonstrate Unicode by executing this in a console:

setfont LatArCyrHeb-16.psf
echo -e '\033%G'
echo -e '\321\200\321\203\321\201\321\201\320\272\320\270\320\271'
echo -e '\141\303\240\304\201\303\241\303\242\303\243\303\244\303\245'
echo -e '\143\303\247\304\215\304\207\304\211'

---

From: Bob Rasmussen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 09:55:45 -0800 (PST)

> > for example then pine could use this kind of terminal and properly display

You may be closer than you think. Read on...

> I've found that can make use of this facility ...

Actually, UTF-8 is a representation of a (nominally) 16-bit character set,
which can store 65535 characters, of which about 39,000 are currently defined.

> if it can't handle UTF-8?

Pine can store and transfer data in a variety of character sets (CHARSETs),
both one-byte (such as ISO-8859-2) and multi-byte (such as SHIFT-JIS). It
should be able to store and transfer in UTF-8. Note, though, that some mail
gateways are limited to 7 bit characters, and so there is also UTF-7.

The problem may be in displaying and inputting the data. When working on a
Linux console, for instance, you're at the mercy of your GUI environment.

If you're using a Windows PC to access Pine/Unix, you may want to look at our
Windows telnet program Anzio. It can be configured to deal with a host system
sending data in UTF-8 encoding, and display the characters directly. It can
also process characters in various other coding schemes, such as ISO-8859-2.
We are in the process of exploring the use of these features with Pine/Unix,
and would appreciate communication with anyone interested.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: [email-masked]
 company e-mail: [email-masked] or [email-masked] or [email-masked]
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