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Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 22:36:56 +0200
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: mutt and locale
Message-ID: <20010925223656.A725@mainframe>
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References: <000101c145fc$37b860f0$2101a8c0 AT nomad> <20010925131001 DOT A1088 AT megachump DOT com>
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In-Reply-To: <20010925131001.A1088@megachump.com>; from tod@megachump.com on Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 01:10:01PM -0700
From: Martin Jerabek <martin DOT jerabek AT utanet DOT at>

On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 01:10:01PM -0700, tplesco wrote:
> Is this strictly a European keyboard issue?

This does not have anything to do with the keyboard. mutt uses isprint()
to determine if a certain character is considered printable. isprint()
in turn uses the current locale information to determine which
characters are printable and which are not. If a character is not
printable, mutt displays a questionmark instead which makes texts that
contain e.g. accented European characters quite hard to read.

Normally it should be possible to tell the system your locale by setting
environment variables like LC_ALL, LANG, etc. So if you set
LC_ALL=de_AT, the system knows that you are Austrian and uses the
appropriate messages (in German), date and time formats, and also a
character set appropriate for this locale. Or at least that is how it is
supposed to work, and it does indeed on most Unix systems. Unfortunately
cygwin does not really support locale information, at least not the part
which determines your character set (LC_CTYPE).

mutt supports such broken systems (no offense) by providing the
mentioned --enable-locales-fix. If this compile time option is set, it
simply assumes that your character set is iso-8859-1 without asking the
system and shows all defined characters (32-126, 160-255). Without this
option mutt displays just the 7bit ASCII characters under cygwin, so
IMHO this should be the way to go. It does not probably help the people
which use a different iso-8859-x character set but it is better than
nothing.

For a thorough explanation of the locale information, see for example
http://www.uni-ulm.de/~s_smasch/Locale/

Thanks for listening
Jerry

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