Re: e-mail encoding/formatting (was Re: Split-screen mode in mutt?)
Thus spake Kyle Wheeler on Mon, May 01, 2006 at 07:03:23PM -0400 or
thereabouts: <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2006-05-01 19:31]:
> 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.
Which is good enough for me.. Even the triple-question mark (talk of
wide characters..) did not bother me all that much.. I was just curious
and wondering what was broken in my setup...
>
> 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).
>
now, that's interesting.. I went to a lot of trouble to enable 256
colors where it's supported (xterm, screen, vim) and I was definitely
not going to do likewise to take a quick peek at utf-8. Now since I'm
pretty sure this 256-color xterm also supports utf-8 and if it's only a
matter of giving it the correct flag(s) on the command line, well then
there's nothing stopping me from running a quick test some time
tomorrow.
.. as to whether I want curly quotes.. yes, absolutely.. on the printed
page.. (and high-quality fonts.. text that's left & right-justified..
etc.)
as to computer screens, I am somewhat sceptical.. the two medium are
different in a number or respects - and obviously dpi resolution is one
of them.. so I'm really questioning the point of trying to support good
typography rules on a medium that was not meant for it in the first
place. All you will get on a computer screen is a rather pathetic
rendering of the original.. there are just not enough pixels/dots for
the font designer to play with..
Amusingly enough the quote/apostrophe that comes with the terminus font
that I use looks more like an "ending" curly quote than the traditional
"straight" quote anyway.
At this point, I am tempted to dismiss as bloat anything that falls
outside the realm of a terminal with a black background and a fixed
font .. :-)
> > 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.
ok.
>
> >> 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.
.. depends what you mean by "good" - it's the one that came with debian
sarge originally.. how can I test/verify its "goodness"?
>
> 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