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Re: e-mail encoding/formatting (was Re: Split-screen mode in mutt?)



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On Sunday, April 30 at 11:49 PM, quoth cga2000:
>> 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.

Most likely.

> I found suggestions I should add the following to my .muttrc:
>
> set charset=iso-8859-1//TRANSLIT

What that will do is convert the curly quotes from the charset they 
were sent in (utf-8) to the nearest approximation in the charset you 
are specifying (iso-8859-1). Since iso-8859-1 does not contain curly 
quotes, you're basically telling mutt to convert the curly quotes into 
straight quotes.

If you want curly quotes, you need to set charset="utf-8", and then 
make sure that both your terminal and your curses library support it. 
Modern versions of xterm, for example, needs the -u8 flag and some 
environment variables set (the easiest way is to use the uxterm 
wrapper).

> or:
>
> charset-hook ^us-ascii$ cp1252 
> charset-hook ^iso-8859-1$ cp1252 
> unset strict_mime 
> set assumed_charset="cp1252"

This is a solution for a different problem (the different problem 
being mis-labeled character encoding). In the case of, for example, my 
email, the encoding is correct and is correctly labelled, so this 
won't help.

>> 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..?

Probably. The only gotcha might be a good ncurses library.

Good luck!

~Kyle
- -- 
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they 
please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk 
congratulations.
                                                       -- Edmund Burke
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