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



Thus spake cga2000 on Wed, May 03, 2006 at 12:50:02AM -0400 or thereabouts: 
<cga2000@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2006-05-03 18:41]:
> Thus spake Kyle Wheeler on Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:07:32AM -0400 or thereab=
> outs: <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2006-05-02 23:08]:
> > On Tuesday, May  2 at 01:39 AM, quoth cga2000:
> > >>> I probably just need to change my locale to UTF-8 and switch to a=20
> > >>> terminal that supports unicode, I guess..?
> > >>=20
> > >> Probably. The only gotcha might be a good ncurses library.
> > >
> > > .. depends what you mean by "good" - it's the one that came with debian=
> =20
> > > sarge originally.. how can I test/verify its "goodness"?
> >=20
> > When you compile mutt,=20
> 
> Thanks, Kyle.. but I do not dare do that on my debian system.=20
> 
> > one of the things it checks for is the=20
> > waddnwstr function, which is only supported in an ncurses library that=20
> > can handle wide characters.
> 
> well I thought what the heck.. proof of the pudding is in the eating..
> so I did the following:
> 
> 1. commented out the translit thing in my .muttrc
> 2. dpkg-reconfigured locales and made en-us.UTF8 the default
> 3. fired up a linux console and ran  /usr/bin/unicode-start
> 4. started mutt and =E2=80=9Cscreen=E2=80=9D - & other curly quotes.. displ=
> ay correctly
> 
> =2E. so I would understand that my ncurses lib is "good enough".
> 
> As to entering all those funky digraphs myself, I'm not going to
> bother.. but as far as displaying message contents and especially the
> names of their authors I find this setup a lot more satisfying than my
> current LANG=3Den.us.=20
> 
> =2E. now tomorrow, I will check that this also works in an xterm.
> 
> Thanks to all those who participated in this sub-thread..=20
> 
> cga

Well, things may not be that trivial after all. With my new setup
Kyle's curly quotes are displayed correctly. The message above does not.

1. My attempt at curly quotes is rendered by displaying what I assume
is the three-byte values of the character in the UTF-8 encoding:
x'e2809c'and x'e2809d'. Mutt's - or whatever's - rendering is actually
an equal sign followed by the hex value of the first byte, followed by
another '=' followed by the hex value of the second.. etc.

2. There are a bunch of =20 artefacts in my email, some corresponding
to the first '.' of my personal rendering of the ellipsis using what
en.US has to offer - I just type two dots like so: '..' uses less space
than three dots..

Same behavior in linux console (after unicode-start) and xterm -e8.

Interestingly, the above message displays correctly in mozilla-mail.

I don't know if anyone is seeing what I am seeing but does anyone guess
at what the problem could be? 

Thanks,

cga