Re: bug

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007, David Paenson wrote:

>
> dear programmers
>
> with near certainty pine has an unfortunate bug affecting
> (at least) users of the german language. i have searched the
> internet for several days, but have found no solution.
>
> here a description of the problem:
>
> using debian 4.0 i can type small letters with "umlaut"
> (that is 2 dots above the letter) in the body of the mail,
> but no capital letters with umlaut, also no german "ss"
> (which looks like this: ß).
>
> or rather, i can type them all, and when i send the mail,
> all characters arrive safely and are properly displayed (as
> ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü, ß) on the receiving end. so obviously the
> characters are properly encoded.
>
> so the problem is not the encoding itself, but the display
> modus.
>
> (cut)
>
I am no (professional) programmer, but rather a simple PINE user, so I 
should really not respond to your mail, which is adressed 'dear 
programmer' ;-)

but here is my 2 bits: I am pretty sure that your problem is not a
PINE bug, but rather a feature:

in principle, PINE uses only ASCII codes. the first 128 characters
of ASCII are really standard encodes with the same 2 bytes
everywhere, but the high 128 characters are BY DESIGN coded 
differently for the different languages, and there are in fact
even different codings for the same language, and the various text 
processing programs use different codings (a fact that you never see
as the user!).

So whatever you send with PINE can have different meanings at the 
receiving side, depending on the editor(s) used on the sending/
receiving side.

And the text displayed by PINE when you do nothing but look at your
mail depends on the character set you asked PINE to use (mine is 
ISO-8859; but some people prefer UTF-8, e.g.).

As a consequence of all this, some people (including me) prefer to
use only the low 128 ASCII characters in their mail, writing "o for
an 'o Umlaut', and ss instead of the German 's-zet'. It is almost as
quick than using the (ambiguously coded) Umlauts, and much safer.

If you are actually quite aware of all this, I apologize for wasting #
your time. But in that case, alas: I don't understand your question.

ccn.
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