[Alpine-info] Alpine converts text attachments badly (was "from a user who only speaks ascii")

[Mike Miller]

On Sat, 21 Mar 2009, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:


> This one I use fairly frequently...

> copyright?	?

>

> The rest of these I have occasionally been guilty of pasting in.

>

> degrees?	? [IE: water freezes at 32?F & boils at 100?C]

> one half?	?

> one quarter?	?

>

> I do hope they normally translate well. What should I call the

> character set if those are the only ones added to ascii???

> How do I tell pine/alpine to so label my email when I include them???



Why not use UTF-8?  Like we said, it reverts to US-ASCII when there are no 
special characters in the message.  It doesn't matter that you don't use 
the gazillion extra characters UTF-8 allows.

As you can see above, all I saw were question marks in your message where 
special characters should have appeared.  This seems to be caused by 
either a bug or bad configuration in Alpine.

The really buggy crazy part has to do with how Alpine saves text 
attachments.  I could view the first text attachment from within Alpine 
using Less (but with LESSCHARSET set to utf-8) and it looked like this:


This one I use fairly frequently...
copyright?      <A9>

The rest of these I have occasionally been guilty of pasting in.

degrees?        <BA> [IE: water freezes at 32<BA>F & boils at 100<BA>C]
one half?       <BD>
one quarter?    <BC>


Less is looking for UTF-8, but I suppose it is getting extended ascii and 
displaying the hex codes.  So I thought I'd save the text file and then 
pipe it through something that would translate those codes to UTF-8. 
Strangely, Alpine did not simply save the text for me, it converted those 
extended ascii characters to question marks.  The same thing happened when 
I piped the text attachment to another program or (not surprisingly) when 
I used Export to save the message.

I was able to look at the characters directly only after saving the 
message to its own folder and converting ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.  Then, using 
the perl program "unum" I was able to see that you are using the wrong 
degree character.  You are using this:

    Octal  Decimal      Hex        HTML    Character   Unicode
     0272      186     0xBA      &ordm;    "º"         MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR

But what you want is this:

    Octal  Decimal      Hex        HTML    Character   Unicode
     0260      176     0xB0       &deg;    "°"         DEGREE SIGN


I am using Alpine 2.00 from the Ubuntu package.

Mike