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. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
