[Alpine-info] problems with accented characters

[Pierre Frenkiel]

hi,
Since my upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04, I was obliged to abandon pine for alpine,
and some features which worked perfectly with pine don't work with
alpine(at least for me).

Among them, the most annoying is the wrong handling of character sets for
accented characters. I found that the only way to use accented characters
(reading and sending), is to set the display-character-set variable to
variable. This doesn't correspond to what is said in the alpine documentation.

I tried a lot of other settings for other variables (character-set,
posting-character-set), with UTF-8, iso-10646-1:

The only variable which has an effect is display-character-set.
All others have absolutely no effect, no more than the LANG environment
variable.

When reading a mail, written either with utf-8 or iso-8859-1, accented
characters are displayed as ? or junk.

It seems clear that the main problem is not with the display setting,
but the handling of character sets by alpine, because:

  1/ When posting, the mail is sent as plain text, instead of being sent
     as quoted printable.  and this has nothing to do with the display
  2/ the display was correct with pine, with character-set=utf-8 or 8859-1
     or 10646-1.
  3/ the display is correct when I do, in my xterm window, a "cat" of a
     file containing accented characters.

I'm using version 1.0 provided by Ubuntu 8.04. I tried to install version
1.10 from the .deb or tgz files, but all fail (needs libldap2, which is not
available...) So, I can't check wether this is fixed in the last version.

Any help would be welcome (I already posted this in the pine-info list, with
no useful answer. I expect to get more from this list)
I