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List:       alpine-info
Subject:    Re: [Alpine-info] Alpine turning characters in question marks
From:       Mike Miller <mbmiller+l () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-12-14 20:22:58
Message-ID: alpine.DEB.2.00.0912141400360.4343 () taxa ! psych ! umn ! edu
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On Sun, 13 Dec 2009, Jake Evans wrote:

>>> I thought it had something to do with charset/translation maybe so 
>>> after significant Googling, I switched to using UTF-8 for everything 
>>> in both my client and in the pine configuration. This helped SOME, but 
>>> not completely.
>> 
>> you mean your UNIX environment too, right?
>> 
>> For example, I have this set in my UNIX environment:
>> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
>> 
>> I don't *think* it's only relevant for Terminal (on Mac OS X).


We had a long thread on this in early December 2008, then in early March 
2009.  In case there is an archive, look for these subjects:

Alpine is converting á to ??
Alpine is converting ? to ??
UTF-8 test message for your viewing (dis?)pleasure

The thing is, you need to have the right Alpine settings, the right 
environment settings (e.g., "LANG"), a compatible terminal and an a font 
that can show the UTF-8 characters.  I was using rxvt at first and that 
did not handle UTF-8, and when I used Xterm I had the wrong font.

Download this text file:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt

If you have everything working, you can "cat" this file and "less" it in 
your terminal, then use Ctrl-R to add it to an email message in Alpine, 
send it to yourself and have everything look great.

For "less" to work correctly, you'll need this in your .bashrc:

set LESSCHARSET=utf-8

I'm using xterm with these fonts in my ~/.Xresources file:

XTerm*font:   -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-80-ISO10646-1
XTerm*font1:  -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--7-70-75-75-C-50-ISO10646-1
XTerm*font2:  -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1
XTerm*font3:  -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-80-ISO10646-1
XTerm*font4:  -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-90-ISO10646-1
XTerm*font5:  -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1


You can probably see why this was hard for me to get right.  In fact, 
years passed between my first attempt and my final success.  You have to 
get several things all right or everything else you do will not help. 
For me, the revelation came when I realized that my *terminal* couldn't 
handle UTF-8, so nothing else I tried had any effect.  When I got the 
right terminal (xterm), I then had to get the right font, but when I 
looked at the UTF-8-demo file in "less," it still didn't work because I 
didn't have the right LESSCHARSET.  See -- it's highly configural.

I'm also getting this to work in Gnome Terminal using Monospace font. 
The fonts above (for Xterm) work except for Ethiopian (do you care?), but 
even Ethiopion works at the larger font sizes.

Mike

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