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Re: [Mutt] #1317: wish $edit_charset



>  The author of this wish list item is complaining that if he uses
>  ISO-8859-1, he can't retain curly quotes in his replies.  ISO-8859-1
>  has none; he's dealing with a misconfigured Windows mailer that's
>  labeling Windows-1252 (or similar) as ISO-8859-1.  This is a
>  suggestion to add a gross hack to work around a brokenness in another
>  program...

No, you did not understand the problem and what the user wants. The
user wants to edit the message in UTF-8 even though his terminal uses
another charset. This is possible with most editors nowadays: they
can handle UTF-8 internally, even though the locale is something
like ISO-8859-1. If such an editor uses its own window, then it will
ignore the locale there (it can display UTF-8). If the editor uses
the terminal window, it does charset translation/transliteration for
the *display* only; internally, the original UTF-8 characters remain
intact.

Note that this is an option: the user will not be forced to use a
different charset for the terminal and for the file to be edited.

> This "bug" is 7 years old, and there remain few genuine obstacles to
> adopting UTF-8.

There are still some places where UTF-8 is badly handled, e.g.
in terminals. Also I move from time to time and I sometimes use
other people's machines to read my mail via ssh; and UTF-8 isn't
always available.

-- 
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)