On Sunday, April 30 at 09:54 PM, quoth Derek Martin:
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.
Heh, much to the detriment? Meh. I’m encouraging those who use good mail clients (like mutt) to set them up in a UTF-8-using way! :) And on top of that, it’s good typography. Quotes have a history of “correct” usage starting LONG before someone decided to cut corners and only have straight quotes available. Technology has finally gotten around to providing some of the more basic features of the Gutenberg printing press. I think this is a great thing.
[How does one even generate these characters on a Unix system, aside from copy-pasting them from some other source?]
There’s a terrific little vim extension called UniCycle that does it: http://jason.diamond.name/weblog/2005/10/20/unicycle-script-for-vim
Even better, some Windows applications use this encoding and incorrectly label the resulting data as iso-8859-1. Extremely annoying.
Eh, add a “charset-hook iso-8859-1 windows-1252” to your muttrc and breathe deeply of the peace of mind.
One of the things I love about mutt is that I can make it elegantly handle just about every email oddity that I’ve come across. I can handle most mislabeled and/or exotic charsets, I can deal with pine users that can’t deal with modern PGP encoding, I can handle html email with ease, etc. A mutt user complaining that email isn’t all 78-column US-ASCII text anymore seems… like complaining that a show you want to watch isn’t on any of your local UHF/VHF stations when you have a perfectly functional satellite dish in the back yard.
~Kyle --May your glass be ever full. May the roof over your head be always strong. May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead.
-- Old Irish Toast
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