[PLUG] UTF-8, Virtual Consoles, and Alpine

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Tue Jul 26 19:26:39 UTC 2016


On Tue, 26 Jul 2016, Rich Shepard wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Jul 2016, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
>
>> A text console still has font choices. Your system documents how.
>
> Michael,
>
> That's very true. And all my consoles and virtual terminals properly 
> display UTF-8 ... except some languages in Alpine.

On one of my Linux systems (CentOS 7, in case it matters), I can run 
cat or less against a Hebrew text file and it shows correctly.

If I send that same text file to myself as an e-mail attachment, 
Alpine will NOT show -- or even save -- it correctly. (I tried sending 
the file from both a Linux host and from a Mac host; the file was 
garbled in both tests.)

Then, I changed the name of the file from, e.g., Hebrew.txt to 
Hebrew.hb and sent it. Since the mail client wasn't able to recognize 
the .hb suffix, the attachments was marked as type 
'Application/OCTET-STREAM' instead of 'Text/PLAIN.' That made all the 
difference: Alpine was able to save the file correctly. (It still 
didn't display it correctly.)


If I put Hebrew directly into the body of the message, Alpine will 
display and reply to it just fine -- but I'm using the built-in 
pico-esque editor, not an external one.


So my first suspicion is that your text isn't getting the correct MIME 
type, but that's just a guess based on what I'm seeing above.

Beyond that, I don't have time to track down what's going on.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/



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