can't write nor display accents characters

[Pierre Frenkiel]

hi,
up to now, I used pine, and had no problem to write and display
accented characters. Now, after installing ubuntu 8.04, pine was no more
available and I was obliged installed alpine. It seems that the compatibilty
with pine is not so good, at least for that point.

I naively supposed that I would be able to install pine with one of
the different files available on washington.edu (.rpm, .deb, tar.gz)
but none of these work (dependencies problem / compile errors with the tarball)

Has anybody an idea to fix that?
(I already tried some possible character-set settings in .pinerc:
utf-8 / iso-10646-1 )


Pierre Frenkiel

[Pierre Frenkiel]

Post by Pierre Frenkiel
. . .
utf-8 / iso-10646-1 )

the last try was the good one: it works with iso-8859-1
but I still don't understand why utf-8 doesn't work,
nor the use of the locale environment, as they worked with pine.

Pierre Frenkiel

[Dan Hatton]

Post by Pierre Frenkiel
up to now, I used pine, and had no problem to write and display
accented characters. Now, after installing ubuntu 8.04, pine was no more
available and I was obliged installed alpine. It seems that the compatibilty
with pine is not so good, at least for that point.
I naively supposed that I would be able to install pine with one of
the different files available on washington.edu (.rpm, .deb, tar.gz)
but none of these work (dependencies problem / compile errors with the tarball)
Has anybody an idea to fix that?
utf-8 / iso-10646-1 )

What sort of terminal are you running (al)pine in? I find that I need
to set the X resources

XTerm.Font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1
XTerm*Font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1
UXTerm.Font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1
UXTerm*Font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1

to get my terminals to display non-ASCII utf8 characters from alpine.

[Dan Hatton]

XTerm*font: 9x15bold
XTerm*font1: 7x13bold
XTerm*font2: 8x13bold
XTerm*font3: 9x15bold
XTerm*font4: 10x20
XTerm*font5: 12x24
and that worked without any problem since more than 10 years.
The problem with accents just appeared after moving to alpine.
As I said, I fixed it, at last, by setting iso-8859-1 in .pinerc, but
alpine is supposed to be unicode compliant, and it seems it is not,
as utf-8 doesn't work.

I think you might need to be need to be more specific in your font
settings to get xterm to display unicode. Since you like 9x15 bold,
you could try the following, which I got from the list of
unicode-compatible fonts at <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html>

XTerm*font: -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-90-ISO10646-1

You could probably try this out without having to edit your
.Xresources, using an appropriate command-line option to xterm.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Post by Dan Hatton

The problem with accents just appeared after moving to alpine. As I
said, I fixed it, at last, by setting iso-8859-1 in .pinerc, but
alpine is supposed to be unicode compliant, and it seems it is not,
as utf-8 doesn't work.

I'm also experiencing funnies with accented characters in alpine (not in
most mail from the majority of correspondents which do not use them but
occasionally).

I start (al)pine in an rxvt with -fn 9x15 (after that I often use control
keys to expand the font a bit).
In the .pinerc I use to read my mail I set
Display Character Set iso-8859-15

Post by Dan Hatton
settings to get xterm to display unicode. Since you like 9x15 bold,
you could try the following,
XTerm*font: -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-90-ISO10646-1

Just tried -fn -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1
(which I got from an earlier mail of yours, and has a good size) in
another account I use to read Usenet news (where it is more likely to find
odd characters). I tried to reset the Display Character Set in THAT
.pinerc to default (which should be UTF8) but in most cases I see funny
characters. If I reset to iso-8859-1 I see correctly the characters in
message which announce them to be iso-8859-1, but not those which it
finds X-UNKNOWN.

Apparently alpine does not accept iso-10646-1 as Display Character Set.

I also tried to explicitly setenv LANG en_US.UTF8, but seems to have no
effect.

[Dan Hatton]

1/ as I already told, the accents worked with pine, and I didn't
change my xterm fonts since more than 10 years.
2/ it works with alpine, by setting 8859-1 in .pinerc
3/ the accents are displayed correctly when I do a "cat file" in a xterm
window
- with a "wrong" font setting in .pinerc, the mail is sent
as plain text, the accented characters being replaced by ?

OK, I think you're right, your data "3/" and "4/" rule out my
explanation. (Although your data "1/" and "2/" _are_ consistent with
the hypothesis I had in mind, namely that some xterm fonts are capable
of displaying iso-8859-1 accented characters, but not of displaying
utf-8 accented characters).

That leaves me all out of ideas...