Dear esteemed Linuxers,
As many of you, I use mutt to do my correspondence, and as many of you should,
I use UTF-8 as my main encoding, for everything. This enables me to edit files
in French, Russian, Turkish, Hebrew at (almost) the same ease (alas I don't
understand some of the things I write, but this is a separate issue ;-). Since
most of my correspondence is in English or Hebrew with an occasional French, I
wish the e-mail to be set in the minimal necessary encoding: 'us-ascii' if pure
English, 'iso-8859-1' if some French, 'iso-8859-8-i' if Hebrew, and if needed,
'utf-8'. For that I shamefully use the mutt configuration parameters:
set charset=utf-8
set send_charset=ascii:latin1:windows-1255:utf-8
charset-hook iso-8859-8-i hebrew
'latin1' is an iconv synonym for 'iso-8889-1' and 'hebrew' is a synonym for
'iso-8859-8'. The third line is needed because otherwise iconv doesn't know
what 'iso-8859-8-i' is. The shameful part is that I have to specify
'windows-1255' in the second line! just 'hebrew' (i.e., 'iso-8859-8') also
works, but it sends the wrong mime charset - it is Visual Hebrew, and people
who get it see it is Hebrew but have to change the charset to Logical Hebrew
before reading it conveniently. The 3rd command is useful for reading mail -
so that mutt knows how to decode Logical Hebrew, but using 'iso-8859-8-i'
instead of 'windows-1255' in the second command is no good - again wrong
mime-charset will be sent - 'iso-8859-8' (without the i). I tried to hide the
shame be replacing 'windows-1255' by 'cp1255', which is the same thing, really,
but looks less windowish, but I got complaint from some correspondents that
their mail readers didn't identify this encoding ("their problem" is not a
solution I recommend ;-)).
Do you see a solution to my dilemma, or should I wait to the time everybody
uses UTF-8 instead of all this plethora of encodings?
--
Dr. Zvi Har'El mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Mathematics
tel:+972-54-227607 icq:179294841 Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
fax:+972-4-8293388 http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~rl/ Haifa 32000, ISRAEL
"If you can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all." -- Thumper (1942)
Monday, 24 Sivan 5763, 23 June 2003, 11:00PM
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