Re: international characters in mutt

[mark@foresthaven.com]

On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 04:39:48PM +0100, Stig Brautaset wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I am having trouble getting mutt to show Norwegian characters (e.g. æ
> and ø). The strange thing is that they work all fine on the command line,
> and if I use more or less to view the mbox-file, they show up as they
> are supposed to. It is, in other words, only a problem in mutt. 
> 
> I have read man muttrc and fiddled with settings a while, but I have not
> managed to crack the problem. Normally the characters come up as
> question marks, but if I put "set charset=iso-8859-1" in my ~/.muttrc I
> get the the special characters coming up as "\345", which is even worse.
> Does anybody have any similar experiences, and a solution to it?
> 

I think I have found a clue about the source of this problem. I
downloaded the mutt source code and looked at the configure options
and found this:

--enable-locales-fix
        on some systems, the result of isprint() can't be used reliably
        to decide which characters are printable, even if you set the
        LANG environment variable.  If you set this option, Mutt will
        assume all characters in the ISO-8859-* range are printable.  If
        you leave it unset, Mutt will attempt to use isprint() if either
        of the environment variables LANG, LC_ALL or LC_CTYPE is set,
        and will revert to the ISO-8859-* range if they aren't.

So, i tried building mutt with this configuration option and found that
international characters display properly in the internal pager. I then
built another version without setting this option and the the characters
did not display properly, just like in the current woody mutt package.

Apparently, the mutt package is not built with this option. I suppose
the question now is whether it should be built with it or if, instead,
the library containing isprint ought to be fixed instead.

-- Mark