[Alpine-info] problems with accented characters

[Pierre Frenkiel]

On Mon, 19 May 2008, Mark Crispin wrote:


> . . .

> [1] There is a configuration problem, either in Alpine, your UNIX 

> environment, or in your terminal emulator. [2] The messages which display 

> incorrectly are in some way non-compliant with the Internet mail standards.

>

> Based upon your description, which includes trouble sending, I suspect cause 

> [1].

> . . .


   hi Mark,
   thank you for you detailed answer.

   I first thought that my problems with sending and displaying mails had
   the same origin, which led to wrong conclusions.
   In fact, I found that they are unrelated.

     1/ Sending UTF-8 mails
        As I said, this had actually nothing to do with
        the xterm fonts. It came from the fact that my editor doesn't produce
        UTF-8, but iso files (independently of any LANG setting)
        After converting the file to UTF-8 with iconv, the mail
        is correctly sent in UTF-8, with quoted-printable encoding.

     2/ Wrong display of accented characters
        The problem actually came from xterm, even after installing the
        debian package xfonts-efonts-unicode
        I discovered that using uxterm instead of xterm miraculously
        solves it.

     There is still one thing which looks like an alpine bug(or at least
     of the ubuntu implementation): The LANG variable is not used.

          With LANG=UTF-8 and display_character-set unset, the display
          of UTF-8 mails should be OK, but I get

         The following text is in the "UTF-8" character set. ]
          [ Your display is set for the "ANSI_X3.4-1968" character set.  ]
          [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

   Thanks again for your help.

Pierre