On Wed, 27 May 2026, Christian Kujau via Alpine-info wrote:
I'm using Alpine 2.29.99 on a remote machine inside a GNU/screen
(v4.09.01) session. My local terminal is Terminal.app on macOS 26.
In my Trash folder I tend to get a lot of spam (who doesn't? :-)) but
recently I started to receive spam messages with Chinese or Japanese
subject lines. I'm starting Alpine with TERM=screen-256color and the
emails look just fine when opened (and all characters are displayed
correctly as far as I can tell), only the index looks garbled. Allow me
to share some pictures, I hope all these URLs make it to the list:
Eeek! This looks really bad.
The problem has to do with character width. Alpine has no idea of the
correct width of the characters it is printing. It is assuming a width
(say 1) when in reality it is different (say 2, in this example).
There are some areas of unicode where the width is ambiguous and the
c-client library, the same library that uses UTF-8 for email, where width
is not a concern, is agnostic of terminals. The problem you are pointing
out was pointed out in the past, and Mark Crisping refused to address it
because (paraphrasing his words) "it would be too slow to print a
character into the screen, determine its actual width, and then continue
printing". I think someone from Suse posted a code that could do that at
the time, and I have tried to find it, but I can't seem to locate it.
You should see this problem when you receive messages with emojis in the
subject. Sometimes they get misaligned for this reason. Not all of them,
but if it happens, that is the reason why.
In any case, the issue is width. I know the problem can be addressed
programatically in a better way, and it seems not to have caused many
problems.
There is a feature in Alpine that might help. Try to see if enabling
[X] Use System Translation
helps a bit. If I find the code to read width from the terminal, I might
add it to Alpine to make this process better.
Thank you.
--
Eduardo
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