Package: locales Version: 2.1.2-10
I would like to ask you how to set up Linux for reading 8bit documents properly. less is not displaying them as it should, and I have a similar problem reading 8bit messages inside mutt. The maintainers of these packages (mutt bug #48408 and less bug #32166), said that the solution is to "set the locale properly" via the environment variables LANG or LC_TYPE. But the problem is that there is no documentation on how to set the locale. I repeat, despite the comments of the mutt maintainer about "TFM", there is NO DOCUMENTATION ON SETTING THE LOCALE. In /usr/doc/locale there are some brief comments on compiling programs with a given locale, but that is not what I need. What I need to do is simply set either LANG or LC_TYPE. But which? And to what? Thomas Schoepf, the less maintainer, suggests setting LANG to de_DE, and this does in fact allow me to read 8bit documents, but has the bad side-effect of putting all system messages into German, which is not terribly helpful. I hope you understand. But if I set LANG to en_EN, ie having the system in English (but with the intention or reading 8bit documents), then I am once again unable to read any 8bit documents. The characters above 128 come out as hex. Please help. Better documentation explaining the procedure in /usr/doc/locales would be desirable. Drew Parsons
