On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 11:13:02PM -0500, Steven T. Hatton wrote:

>
> On Thursday 20 February 2003 07:45 pm, Arlie Stephens wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 06:21:20PM -0500, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
> > > I've been informed that others may have difficulty reading my posts
> > > because I've been using UTF-8 encoding. Is this true?
> >
> > Some of your posts arrive as illegible gooblety gook on my linux system.
>
> If you open an xterm and execute the `locale` command, you should get a
> listing of your current settings. I'll bet good money you will see posix
> for everything.

Actually, what I have is en_US.

> > I have no idea what I would need to do to understand UTF-8. Given the
> > number of people who apparantly can't read it, I wouldn't want to do
> > anything that might result in my system sending out messages in that form.
>
> > I'm running redhat linux 7.1, using mutt as my mail client, with North
> > American settings.
>
> My guess is, it's not that hard. If I get a message that I can't read due to
> encoding, I go up to the "view|set encoding" and select what I think they
> would be using. Mutt probably has a command for that. I use KMail.

Mutt doesn't seem to have anything of the sort. It's an old terminal based
mail program ... a variant of elm. But that's what I need, because of reading
mail remotely; the alternative would be an IMAP server, so I could run the
client on the remote system ... basically, way too much systems administration
effort for my tastes.

> http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcd/ind/aind/ved/rv/mt/rv.htm
>
> The part I'm not really understanding is why so many clients don't convert
> seamlessly between encodings. I rarely have a problem with KMail.

How do you edit the stuff? Emacs seems to be the thing that matters,
from the sending POV. If I compose new text and put non-us-ascii chars into
it, it sometimes asks what encoding I want, and sometimes seems to just
happily use ISO-8859-1.

> I fully understand not wanting to mess with this stuff. I hate it! That's
> why I want everything in UTF-8. That way, my programs don't have to guess
> what kind of encoding to use. The problem for me is that XML and Java are by
> default UTF-8, and when I use a different encoding, I have to specify that
> somehow in the code. If I don't realize the file is in the wrong encoding, I
> can spend hours debugging my parsers.

Yuck ... standards in transition are such a pain.

--
Arlie

(Arlie Stephens arlie@...)