On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 06:52:11AM -0400, Vadim Vygonets wrote: > Quoth Tzafrir Cohen on Sun, Aug 31, 2003: > > On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 01:34:35AM -0400, Vadim Vygonets wrote: > > > Except some of us use tty-based mailers (for various reasons), > > > and UNIX does not support Unicode natively yet. And support for > > > Hebrew in UNIX is much less advanced than support for Russian and > > > Japanese, for example. > > > > Actually, if the system's iconv doen't work well you can install gnu's > > libiconv and have a decent charset and uniicode support. > > The problem is that most things in UNIX assume one-byte > characters, and applications may behave unexpectedly when given > multibyte text (Unicode, far east languages, etc.). Case in > point: you need a special terminal emulator (kterm), special > editor (jvi) and pager (jless) to work with Japanese text (and > I'm not even talking about input methods for the multitude of > characters that the language has yet).
Use vim 6. Use dtterm or uxterm. Or build mlterm on your own. With dtterm you have to use a UTF-8 locale (probably en_US-UTF-8). This is something that should work on a standard solaris 8/9 desktop. As for less: I'm not sure. > > I18n in UNIX is quite weak in general: try convince tty-based > apps to display Polish and Russian (for extra points, make them > display the two languages simultaneously). Right-to-left > languages are even more problematic than that. install fribidi and optionally bidiv. Then use either the fribidi command-line filter (on a UTF-8 locale) or bidiv (elsewhere). Alternatively: Sun published the code for bidi in, e.g. terminals. I don't know if it is used in Solaris 9. But it is used in the debain package xiterm. ncurses has a version that supports multi-byte chars: ncursesw. Mutt (and screen) can be built with it. This gtreatly improves the UTF-8 capabilities. This is what I use. > > This all means that if your mailer is tty-based, you need to > decide which languages (encodings, to be exact) to use *before* > you run it. Which sucks, frankly. pine is indeed problematic. Though I heared that there are some patches for partial handling, and that pine 4.50 is a small step in that direction. Mutt can be used, if you read the README carefully enough while building, as mentioned above. I don't know about elm and other mailers. There is preliminary support in gnu emacs., which gives support to some other potentially-tty mailers. > > > > In light of this, please explain why Emacs-bidi was developed in > > > Japan, and not (e.g.) Israel or an Arabic country that actually > > > *uses* right-to-left text. > > > > [ Just to remind to the gnus/vm users here: you might want to try it ] > > I use mutt/nvi, anyway ;) Try vim 6. No bidi support but solid unicode and otherwise multibyte support. -- Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+ http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
