Subject: Extended characters in pine

From: Mac Newbold <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 16:12:21 -0700 (MST)

I frequently find myself writing messages in foreign languages, and as of yet
I haven't been able to find a convenient way to write characters with accents
or n with ~ yet. I've always been able to read them just fine, but never write
them.

Is there an easy way to write these extended or accented characters in Pine?
What other foreign language support is there in Pine?

Thanks,
Mac Newbold

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|  Mac Newbold                  |  Univ. of Utah Computer Science Dept.  |
|  [email-masked]          |  http://www.cs.utah.edu/~newbold       |
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From: Eduardo Chappa <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 17:25:23 -0800 (PST)

*** Mac Newbold ([email-masked]) wrote in the pine-info list today:

:) Is there an easy way to write these extended or accented characters
:) in Pine? What other foreign language support is there in Pine?

  Everything depends on the meaning of the word "easy". Probably you have
set your character-set variable to something like "iso-8859-1", so that
you can read them fine.

  There are several ways to input these kind of characters, here go some
suggestions:

 1) Press ESC ESC n, where "n" is a number, when n is 234 you will see the
letter ê, when n is 233 you'll see é, etc. "n" is the ascii code of the
letter you want to input.

 2) Apply a patch that I wrote that allows you to input those characters
in the "latex" way, if you apply the patch, you need to press CTRL-\ to
input the accent, then type the accent type and finally the letter over
which you'll put the accent, so ^\'a = á, ^\"e = ë, ^\~n = ñ, etc. The
complete description of all the "accents" that are supported, together
with the patch can be found in my web site (address below).

 3) use some type of script and use sending-filters to do the job.

-- 
Eduardo
http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/

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From: Henrik Edlund <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:24:07 +0100 (CET)

On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Mac Newbold wrote:

> I frequently find myself writing messages in foreign languages, and as
> of yet I haven't been able to find a convenient way to write
> characters with accents or n with ~ yet. I've always been able to read
> them just fine, but never write them.

I input them fine from my normal keyboard.

-- 
Henrik Edlund <[email-masked]>
http://www.edlund.org/

  "They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Naturally they became heroes."
                  Leia Organa of Alderaan, Senator

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From: Eduardo Chappa <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:09:04 -0800 (PST)

*** Henrik Edlund ([email-masked]) wrote in the pine-info list today:

:) I input them fine from my normal keyboard.

The original question refers to what do you do when you can't really input
these accents from your keyboard.  I spent a long time writing incorrect
spanish before I found a way to input an accent, since I could not do it
from my keyboard. The patch I use today was my second try, I used to use
sending-filters to do it, and entered something like \'e, which the filter
interpreted as é. Today I have a keyboard (well, not all the time) that
allows me to enter accents from the keyboard, but there's no logic about
which combination of keys gives you which accent. Pine's interface to
enter special characters means that you need to learn a couple of ascii
codes, for spanish this number is 14, for french it's much more. It's too
much. When you can't do this input from the keyboard one needs a way to do
this, that will be easy to remember and that uses the minimal amount of
kestrokes. I would love to listen any suggestion on how to do this.

---

From: Ivan Zakharyaschev <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 00:15:11 +0300 (MSK)

Hello, Eduardo!

On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Eduardo Chappa wrote:

> interpreted as И. Today I have a keyboard (well, not all the time) that

In Linux kernels, there's a possibility to describe key combinations that
are composed together to produce a single input character on a console.

Perhaps, that's a well-known feature...

Anyway, here's an example: one, having console-tools installed, can do the
following:

# find out what the code for Right Alt is:

$ showkey --timeout 3
kb mode was XLATE

press any key (program terminates after 3s of last keypress)...
keycode  28 release
keycode 100 press
keycode 100 release

# load a keymap

$ loadkeys
plain keycode 100 = Compose
compose ''' 'e' to 'И'
^D

# Now one can press Right Alt, then ', then e, and he'll get an И in the
# input (for me that's a Russian letter).

In fact, usually, all this hasn't to be done, because many useful compose
rules are already loaded by default. To find out whether it is so, you can
run:

$ dumpkeys -1 | grep Compose
             control keycode  52 = Compose
plain keycode 100 = Compose
$ dumpkeys | grep compose

Probably there are similar tools in kbd package, too. I do not know
anything about other Unices.

Best regards,
Ivan