Re: how to type accents with pine in a msg?
Ted Harding <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> wrote:
> Even simpler is to change the "pine" editor to vim, and enable vim's
> digraph support. Then you can enter all the accented charracters in
> ISO-8859-1 by typing Ctrl-V followed by two other characaters.
>
> E.g. "e-acute" is "^Ve'".
>
Sorry, but this is wrong... but please read on.
Through the decades we've had problems with things of this kind, so please
scratch methods of this nature. This method is non-standard... and its
existance is pre-historic :-) If somebody needs to enter accented characters,
(s)he is more than likely to need them in more places then just this 'vim'
session, so a more permanent solution is needed (and 'wim' has no problem
accepting the standard accented shortcuts).
The entrance of an accented character *IS* keyboard specific... and should
remain that way... accented characters are characters with an acute, and
an acute is a part of the ISO character set... a dead-acute is a part of
the ISO too. This means, you enter dead_acute+a to get 'á' or `+a=à,
or ^+a=â, or ¨+a=ä...
Entering ISO characters is keyboard specific, if a package has a problem
accepting ISO-8859-1/2 character set, then please say so... a solution should
be reached to have the package accept the character set (I think somebody
posted a way to have pine accept iso character set here).
Somebody is probably going to say, hey! what's wrong with "^Ve'" well, for
one it is CTRL-V+e+APASTROPHE... and comes from the time when the character
set didn't have an acute... it does now. Back then, the only locale was the
C locale, which had the built-in ctype array, which only mapped 7-bit ascii
and going around it, required some work around... today you can get the full
8-bit ctype array locale specific iso-whatever with 'setlocale(CATEGORY,"")'.
The point is, one should minimize the need of different keystrokes with many
different packages... so, the key-binding specifies which keystrokes give the
accented character, and the package accepts it by accepting the character
set given by the locale...
hope that made some sense... :-)
Someone with (a)cute ears ;-)
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Ørn Einar Hansen oe.hansen@halmstad.mail.telia.com
oehansen@daimi.aau.dk
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