Demoroniser (was: Display Filters)
Hi Gary,
On Thursday, June 29, 2006 at 18:58:50 -0700, Gary Johnson wrote:
>>> converts certain Microsoft characters to their ASCII equivalents.
> that [Demoroniser] script is widely used and has documentation, I'd
> recommend using it
Sorry: Me not. I downloaded Demoroniser and evaluated its special
characters conversion feature in the context of Mutt $display_filter. It
has other features, and can be used for HTML outside of Mutt. But in the
precise evaluated conditions, Demoroniser seems very bad to me:
· In many cases it doesn't provide the expected benefit. You just get 1
to 3 question marks for those special chars, as usual.
· It doesn't apply to index, nor to replies you compose.
· In some cases it acts, and provides the wanted Ascii approximations
for \200-\237. That's mostly cases where something is broken: Mutt
setup, iconv, locale, or the mail itself. Properly fixing the brokenness
from the beginning would give better results.
· The said Ascii approximations are sometimes not really nice. The
U+20AC '€' Euro symbol shouts an error. Spurious HTML tags do appear
(like "<em>f</em>" for the U+0192 'ƒ' hooked letter f). The U+2030 '‰'
per mille sign hurts in some locales...
· Demoroniser breaks badly in many locales having a charset different
from Latin-1 (and similar scheme). Especially it garbles display of some
"normal" accented letters and symbols in locales using UTF-8, CP-852,
GBK, EUC-JP, EUC-TW, and such.
Incomplete action and grave drawbacks. Conclusion: I recommend to
avoid usage of Demoroniser as $display_filter in Mutt. Other better,
cleaner, more elegant and universal solutions do exist against the base
problem.
Bye! Alain "Bazooka" Bench.
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