Re: Thread dorked. Was: Re: System Dorked -- Help!
Quoting Thomas Schmitt (scdbackup@gmx.net):
> as a bystander i must say that the involved mail clients
> invest much effort in making this thread a mess.
>
> In the archives, the initial message is quite readable
> but with seriously oversized lines:
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2015/10/msg01079.html
>
> The two follow-ups by the original poster don't make it
> better, but also not much worse.
>
> Then comes
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2015/10/msg01091.html
> where Renaud's client obviously copied the previous text
> in a way which, after running through the archive's web server,
> makes my Iceweasel go mad.
> Text snippets like
> "pam ot gniyrT :lataF"
> reveil their origin only if i read them backwards
> "Fatal: Trying to map"
>
> My local mail client alpine shows the older texts as large
> paragraphs with no line breaks and interjected ">" or "<".
> Also there are placeholder characters for undisplayable UTF-8
> characters.
>
> My mailbox file contains stuff like
> "=E2=80=AD=E2=80=AEMore:I installed to the"
> According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8, "E2" indicates
> a three-byte character.
> http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richard/utf-8.cgi?input=E2+80+AD&mode=bytes
> says its LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE.
> The other
> http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richard/utf-8.cgi?input=E2+80+AE&mode=bytes
> is RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE.
I deleted the original email because I couldn't be of any help. But I
looked at Renaud's email after seeing your post. I read my emails on
wheezy, and emacs there couldn't see anything odd. However, I
transferred the file to my laptop where I've processed Hebrew text in
music scores and am familiar with the bizarre (to Latin eyes) way the
cursor moves in emacs. Sure enough, jessie's emacs displays a large
chunk of Renaud's email "backwards" because of the RLOs.
In mutt (both versions), the LRO/RLOs are displayed as blobs, but if I
try to reply (which uses emacs), wheezy shows all the text LtoR
whereas jessie reverses much of it.
The apparent weirdness is compounded if you press return in the
reversed text. Now the (new) paragraphs are no longer surrounded by
RLOs so some of the text instantly switches to normal. (Not all of it:
there are embedded marks at "An more:".)
So the people with "a problem" may merely be those running more modern
capable software.
Where did the LRO/RLOs come from; well one might suppose that it could
be connected with the OP's locale appropriate to residing in IL.
Cheers,
David.
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