Re: Text Format -iso- or -ascci-
On Mon, 24 Nov 1997, Daniel Mashao wrote:
> I occasionally get the following message on my mail reader
>
> [The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set]
> [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set]
> [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly]
>
> I would like to start a discussion on this.
> 1. Where can I set my text to the "iso-8859-1" character set?
Assuming you're using pine (from the format of the message it looks like
it), you just need to change the "character-set" value under pine's
configuration (i.e. go into Setup->Configure from the main menu) and set
it to "ISO-8859-1" (I don't think caps matter, though I have them).
> 2. What is advisable -iso- or -us-? What are the benefits of each? How
> much will I lose?
Well, iso-8859-1 is a superset of us-ascii; it's the character set also
known as iso-latin1. So in going from us-ascii to iso-8859-1 you won't
lose anything (though you'll begin causing messages like the above on
other people's mailreaders). iso-8859-1 has common western european
characters that don't fall in the ascii character set (like ü, í, ç, æ,
and ø), in addition to everything us-ascii has. Assuming you're using
pine in either a standard xterm or the linux console with the standard
fonts, this should be no problem.
If you're developing something for distribution, however, you should use
us-ascii where possible since you can't always guarantee that the
recipient is using a terminal capable of displaying iso-latin-1, (for
example, someone using a kterm) but us-ascii is a character set that
almost all terminals can display. This is why it's pine's default
character set.
Not that you'll still get messages like the above when people use a
character set other than iso-latin-1 or us-ascii (there are people on this
list who use UTF-8 and iso-latin-2, for example). I don't know of a
general way to avoid the message.
> 3. If I wanted to change to -iso- where are all the configuration files
> that will need changing?
I'd just go through pine's config menu, as above.
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