[Alpine-info] UTF8 test

[Lucio Chiappetti]

On Tue, 24 Mar 2009, Stuart Rowan wrote:


> Given the recent discussions ... it may be interesting to see how well the

> following text [1] displays for various folks on various platforms with

> various terminal emulators, fonts, cosmic llamas etc.



> [1] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt


Hi, I kept the original message pending for a while in my inbox, now I did 
some tests.

Not that this matters very much for me (I do not know Thai or Georgian nor 
have correspondents who write to me in Russian [*] so I never really cared 
about UTF-8), the only thing I might like is not to see an odd question 
mark here and there when somebody writes to me with a character set which 
may contain an odd Umlaut (ü) or other sign (ñ å etc.),

  - my environment : SuSE 9.2 (with fvwm 2.5.10 if that matters)

  - in firefox (1.5.0.7) the text at the URL above looks sort of fine
    (at least I see the characters ... the alignment of the various
    braces and vertical bars is not always perfect)

  - neither my old pine 4.61, nor the alpine 2.00 I regularly use do
    display your original test message (to the alpine list) in any
    meaningful way (just lots of ??????? question marks)

  - I run alpine in a wrapper csh script in an rxvt terminal.
    The wrapper csh script now contains a setenv LANG en_US.UTF-8
    (my default .cshrc has LANG unset) but this seems not to have
    any effect

  - I have Display Character Set set to either ISO-8859-15 or ISO-8859-1
    (I alternate between them when I receive an "odd" message, I mean
    one with just a few odd characters). All other character sets have
    "no value set" in .pinerc

  - I can generate occasional odd characters when posting (as I did
    above for üñå) using the Alpine patch for control-\

  - the curious thing is that our main mail server receives and quarantines
    lot of spam in cyrillic (koi8-r). If I ssh to the server (using xterm
    -e ssh ....) and run there pine 4.61 (no alpine yet though the SuSE
    version is higher) to access the quarantine folders, I do see cyrillic
    characters perfectly. LANG is unset on the remote machine.

  - I tried forwarding your test message, but I'm not sure if my alpine
    will corrupt it. Anyhow once ssh'd on the server I see only the long
    list of ????????? question marks.

    I also tried exporting it to a file in a scratch area, and manually
    appending it to the quarantine folder on the server, and still I see
    only the list of ????????? question marks.

  - I cannot forward the cyrillic spam in toto from the quarantine area of
    the server to my machine (spamassassin will catch it), but if I use
    some tricks, what I get is just the usual list of ????????? question
    marks

  - if I use xterm to ssh to my local machine, I see the question marks
    (unlike the server)

  - if I use rxvt to ssh to the server, I see odd characters (sort of
    barred Ds etc.) instead of cyrillic

  - by the way the X resource file used by xterms contain

*VT100*font: 
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed-*-13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1
*VT100*wideFont: 
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-13-120-75-75-c-120-iso10646-1
*VT100*font1: 
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1
*VT100*wideFont1: 
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-18-120-100-100-c-180-iso10646-1

  - I am not aware of any specific X resource for rxvt, but the mail
    alias invokes it with -fn 9x15 (a decent font which, combined with
    some ++ and a choice of background and foreground, matches well my
    presbyopia)

Any idea of (non-revolutionary) improvements I can make ?


[*] I occasionally do make postscript birthday cards in which I 
translitterate somebody's name in various alphabets ... but then I load 
explicitly a font, and use hex encoding ...

-- 
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
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