Re: [Mutt] #3040: charset difference between index browser and
On 2008-03-28 09:48:02 -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
> switch your environment to UTF-8. So who's the idiot?
You're not living in the real world. How can one switch the Zaurus
to UTF-8? How can one switch the environment to UTF-8 when UTF-8
locales have not been installed and the user isn't root and the
admins are not responsive?
There are also many bugs related to UTF-8, e.g. Debian bug 391452
(that's the most important one), Debian bug 254507, cooked mode
under Mac OS X, all these bugs with combining characters (they
occur much more often when using Mac OS X). Also, emacs22 isn't
in Debian/stable yet, and emacs21 is very broken under UTF-8
locales (in particular, copy-paste doesn't work). I've started to
switch to UTF-8, but I'm fed up with all these bugs I encounter,
so that I'm still mainly under ISO-8859-1 locales.
Another main problem: Most of my files are in ISO-8859-1. And things
like grep wouldn't work under UTF-8 (is there any wrapper?).
Also, latex is reported to have problems with UTF-8 files, though
I haven't tried it myself.
> > With Emacs, I can, even in ISO-8859-1 locales.
>
> You can view Japanese characters in Emacs running in an xterm with
> ISO-8859-1 settings and fonts? I sincerely doubt that...
Most of the time, I use Emacs under ISO-8859-1 in its own window.
So, I can view non-ISO-8859-1 characters without any problem.
Otherwise, I don't mind not being able to view them. But it is
important that these characters are not lost when replying to a
message (e.g. one gets the same subject, starting with "Re: ");
and Mutt currently cannot do this in locales different from UTF-8
(contrary to other MUA's).
> Mutt is not a graphical program, and can not choose what fonts are
> available on the terminal it's running in.
It doesn't need to do that: when sending information to an editor,
Mutt doesn't display anything. Emacs can work with UTF-8 files
under ISO-8859-1 without any problem. When running in xterm, some
characters would be displayed as a question mark, but this isn't
a major problem when one usually works under ISO-8859-1 locales.
But these characters are preserved when saving the file.
> If the environment is not unicode and the glyphs aren't available in
> the fonts loaded in the terminal, there's not much Mutt can do about
> that.
It could at least preserve the characters *internally*.
> I didn't miss the point. Switch to UTF-8 and you don't have this
> problem. That's the point.
So, Mutt is assuming that to be able to work correctly, the user
must be under UTF-8 locales. A limitation that some other MUA's
don't have.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)