On 2000-05-18 22:46:15 -0500, Carlos Puchol wrote:
> redhat released an update, mutt-1.2i-2, but it needs to
> have --enable-locales-fix added to the ./prepare line
> for accented chars to print (the --with-charmaps option
> does not seem to affect at all).
There are two things which affect display and recoding of
messages in non us-ascii character sets:
- the charset variable
- your locale settings
Currently, these settings are unrelated; future versions
of mutt (not in the 1.2 series) will derive the charset
default from the locale if appropriate library functions
are present.
Now, what happens? The charset variable tells mutt what
character set you are using locally. The message parsing
code will recode any messages to that character set if
possible; so people who have a local character set of
koi8-r (sp?) can read and reply to messages in, say,
windows-1251.
The system's locale settings tell mutt what characters can
be displayed, and what characters can't be displayed. So,
if you have charset=iso-8859-1, but are using some locale
which doesn't know about anything but us-ascii characters,
äöüßé and friends will be displayed as question marks -
after all, the locale tells mutt that these characters
aren't printable on the current terminal.
The solution? Either make mutt's checks independent of
the locale (--enable-locales-fix), which is generally a
bad idea, or make sure your locale settings are
appropriate and tell the truth about printable and
non-printable characters.
LC_CTYPE=de_DE should work for iso-8859-1, BTW.
--
http://www.guug.de/~roessler/
