Re: UTF-8?

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Matt Ackeret wrote:

> How do I make pine use UTF-8?
>
> There is the "character-set" setting, but that wants various ISO- values,
> which apparently aren't the same as what UTF-8 refers to.
>
> Disclaimer -- as is probably obvious from the above, I know very 
> little about this character set stuff.

Neither do I. What I do understand about UTF-8 is that it seems to be a 
way to marshall US-ASCII, its 8-bit descendants and Unicode into a 
variable-number byte-encoded representation. As such, unlike the 
"classical" charset interpretation, it isn't a simple matter of loading 
the right font and collation table; one has to represent all data in 
Unicode internally in order to deal with UTF-8.

I do not know enough about Pine's guts to know how hard it would be to 
support UTF-8 properly, but for the time being I think it would be a 
major improvement if just UTF-8 encoded "smart quotes" would be mapped 
to ISO-8859 encoded quotes. As it stands, Pine renders "smart quotes" as 
something like ~Qsmart quotes~S which confuses the heck out of me. It 
just doesn't irritate me enough to drop my pencil and start working on 
it though :-)

I *think* proper UTF-8 support is a hard addition to Pine. I'd love to 
be proven wrong. On the up side, when it does support it, it will 
automatically allow mixing languages such as Russian and Chinese in a 
single message part.

Oh, and another thing I'm not aware of is how different platforms affect 
UTF-8. It is quite conceivable that half the problem of supporting UTF-8 
on UNIX is getting a UTF-8 capable xterm.
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