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Re: Printing messages - Setting fontsize.



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On Tuesday, September  5 at 07:38 PM, quoth Derek Martin:
> Oh, come on Kyle, that's not really true.  There are few systems in 
> existence today which can't handle at least most of the Latin-based 
> ISO standard character sets.

That statement is trivially false. Virtually every car, airplane, and 
microwave out there has a computer in it these days, and very few of 
them speak many standard character sets. Not to mention all the 
financial systems (like the mainframes that still run the payroll at 
several US universities) that nobody wants to upgrade. What I suppose 
you meant is that there are few "desktop" systems that cannot handle 
several charsets. This depends on your definition of "few", and also 
on your definition of "cannot". As to the first, my university still 
provides incoming CSE grad students with Sparcstations running Solaris 
8. Maybe they're the only ones in the world with a few Sun boxes still 
kicking around, but since I know many of the people using those 
machines, that makes it an important demographic to me. As to the 
latter, yes you can probably install enough third-party software onto 
your Solaris 8 box to handle whatever charset you like, but that's a 
pain. Indeed, many of my friends use the pine mailer, which stolidly 
refuses to recognize any charset but us-ascii on all of their systems. 
I understand that if they got the latest patches, and put some effort 
into configuring things just so, they might be able to do better than 
us-ascii (and I've told them so, and told them how, on multiple 
occasions), but they have no interest. There are several professors in 
my department that still use "mh" to read their email, which has no 
knowledge of anything non-ascii (heck, just getting some of them to 
handle MIME is a battle).

This is one of the reasons I like mutt: I can send whatever limited 
form of email my intended recipient can read, and I can view whatever 
bizarre forms of email that people send to me.

> UTF-8 *is* the standard... or at least *a* standard.  Trouble is not 
> everyone likes to comply to standards, and there is still a lot of 
> crufty software out there.  We'll get there.  Maybe 2 more years.

Just because it's *a* standard doesn't mean much. EBCDIC is also *a* 
standard, as is TCP-over-carrier-pigeon, but I don't see much of a 
stampede to use either one.

Unicode is a character standard that is indeed quite useful and solves 
several problems for OS people. UTF-8 is a useful sub-domain of that 
standard. While I have no doubt that Unicode will be used for 90% of 
all computer IO in new systems in two years, we will forever be 
dealing with the systems and softwares of the past. About a year after 
XP was released, Microsoft did a survey, and discovered that a large 
percentage (on the order of 30%, but I don't remember the exact 
number) of their installed user-base was still using Windows 95!

Why, just today I sent an email to my priest who it turns out is still 
using Outlook Express 6.0. I sent in my usual format; UTF-8 with a 
PGP/MIME detached signature. He complained that he couldn't view 
either of my attachments (the only attachment was the signature; 
Outlook treated the main body of the email as an attachment because it 
didn't understand UTF-8).

~Kyle
- -- 
Many who claim to have been transformed by Christ's love are deeply, 
even murderously, intolerant of criticism.
                                                         -- Sam Harris
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