Subject: Chinese characters

From: Jim Worthington <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 20:09:37 -0400 (EDT)

I have been trying to figure out how to include Chinese (simplified)
characters in pine; I've set the character-set variable to
"UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7" though it's probably not necessay.  It seems I can
paste in Chinese etc. in "gb2312" character set (Netscape, Windows use)
and pine passes them along fine, though gb2312 is not supported by pine,
so they aren't displayed right; but if I wanted to enter them in Unicode,
then they would be displayed right (I'm guessing most people would not
have unicode fonts installed in Netscape/Windows however)?  Any
suggestions/comments? Thank you,

Jim
--
Jim Worthington
D/Chemistry and Biochemistry
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, PA 15282-1530

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Yanbian University of Science & Technology,
teaching Engineering, Business, and Foreign Languages

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From: Bob Rasmussen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 12:35:09 -0700 (PDT)

> suggestions/comments? Thank you,

You don't say whether you're using Pine on Unix or PC-Pine. The following will
assume Pine on Unix.

My perception is that Pine is fairly transparent with characters (unless your
email went through a 7-bit link somewhere). What you enter is what gets
displayed. The character-set variable tells an outgoing message what its
encoding is; it's up to the recipient's mail client to render that properly.

So when you send a message, if you're saying it's encoded in Unicode, you
ought to convert it to Unicode. More on this later.

When Unix Pine receives an email with a character-set designation different
from yours, it simply advises you of that. It doesn't translate at all. It's a
weak point in Unix Pine, IMHO.

Here's a solution, again assuming Unix Pine:

Use Anzio (our product) for your telnet client. Tell Anzio to send to and
receive from the host in UTF8. Tell Pine its character-set is UTF8. Now you
can paste Chinese (Russian, Latvian, etc.) characters in, from any
Unicode-enabled application on your Windows PC. Your email messages will go
out in an internally consistent form. (You could alternatively set Anzio and
Pine to use GB, or various other charsets).

When you receive an email in a particular charset, just set Anzio to match
that charset, and have Pine redisplay the message. You'll see your Chinese,
etc. It is also possible to set up your mailcap to switch Anzio into different
charsets and then display the message with "less" or something similar. Of
course you'll have to have a font with Chinese characters.

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

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