Re: e-mail encoding/formatting (was Re: Split-screen mode in mutt?)
Thus spake Derek Martin on Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 09:54:22PM -0400 or
thereabouts: <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2006-04-30 22:05]:
[...]
>
> Kyle is, for some unfathomable reason, rather predisposed to use
> "curly quotes" -- much to the detriment of most people who are not
> reading mail on a Windows system with the Windows-specific cp1232
> character encoding, or using a UTF-8 locale with a fairly complete
> universal font. [How does one even generate these characters on a
> Unix system, aside from copy-pasting them from some other source?]
> Even better, some Windows applications use this encoding and
> incorrectly label the resulting data as iso-8859-1. Extremely
> annoying.
>
.. well I find this very interesting - and thanks for opening a
subthread - so-to-speak - regarding this..
I googled a bit and found an interesting prior thread on this subject.
> Many, if not most encodings simply don't contain these characters, and
> so mutt can (normally) only display them as question marks. From a
> typesetting-aesthetics perspective, they're kind of neat if your
> system configuration happens to support them,
I still run mozilla-mail on the side (to help me investigate problems I
may encounter in mutt/slrn) and Kyle's curly quotes are rendered quite
nicely in mozilla-mail when I access his message in newsgroup
"gmane.mail.mutt.user". And since I am using the same screen
font (xos4/terminus) - both in mutt and mozilla-mail, it should be
possible to convince the former to render the curly quotes correctly.
> but completely
> unintelligible otherwise. Usually you can guess what they are from
> context, but sometimes they just confuse things, especially if English
> is not your native language...
>
> This has been discussed fairly recently, and there is a configuration
> setting which will make mutt cope with these characters...
I found suggestions I should add the following to my .muttrc:
set charset=iso-8859-1//TRANSLIT
or:
charset-hook ^us-ascii$ cp1252
charset-hook ^iso-8859-1$ cp1252
unset strict_mime
set assumed_charset="cp1252"
... but neither one seems to have any effect as far as I am concerned.
So it looks this is something I will have to live with for the time
being. I have made a note of it and I will save Kyle's message for..
later.
> but it
> would be far nicer if people would just not use these largely
> unavailable and extremely annoying characters in their e-mail. As I'm
> using a UTF-8 locale with suitable fonts, I can see them...
I probably just need to change my locale to UTF-8 and switch to a
terminal that supports unicode, I guess..?
> so I don't
> remember the configuration option, but no doubt someone will repeat
> and/or point you to it. But these characters have previously annoyed
> me in mail and other contexts (like web pages) for a very long time...
> Sigh.
>
>
Thanks much for your comments. I am shamefully ignorant of these
aspects but I find them very interesting. I don't have the time now but
I will definitely look into this further as soon as I can.
cga