Re: LYNX-DEV pardon my french

[David Combs]

> From address@hidden Tue Nov 19 23:34:51 1996
> From: address@hidden (David Woolley)
> Subject: Re: LYNX-DEV pardon my french
> 
> > > Maybe you have a better version of lynx than I do, but
> > > here is what I get via lynx 2.6:
> > 
> > A lot of it has to do with your terminal.  Via most PC-based terminals, I
> > get all kinds of characters instead of accent marks, but with MSKermit,
> > all is well.
> 
> Some Linux builds of Lynx using curses, use the non-ASCII characters
> as stand out (reverse video) characters, in which case, setting 
> 7 bit approximations is the best that can be done.
> 
> Incidentally, David Combs' email violated RFC 821 by including them
> as raw 8 bit codes; my ISP uses MMDF, which is pedantic on this point,
> so I saw them as missing characters.

1: how I got the text into the email: I "printed" it from
   Lynx into a file, reduced that to a few lines, then
   did an "r" from mail (actually vi "within" mail).

2. In case you didn't get my messed-up email, the problem I had
   was with TIP, the sun-provided dial-out facility: 7-bit only.
   Nothing I could see on screen, nothing I could download VIA
   tip, showed those characters correctly.  Nor did vi or cat -v
   show them as octal or decimal values -- finally I tried emacs,
   which DID show them, eg eacute as octal 351.

3. Downloading works of course via tar and ftp, but doing it
   via TIP itself requires doing uuencode first.  

4. I will put out request on net on if there is an 8-bit TIP-like
   program that works on unix, and will let you know what I find.
   This is a problem that others can have too, and it was not so
   easy to find the cause.  Thanks to my having several months prior downloading
   something french via tar and ftp (but I did not actually LOOK
   at it til, what, yesterday, locally, and noticed perfect
   accents, etc -- until then, I had no idea it was even POSSIBLE
   to show "ascii" that way (me knowing nothing about 8-bit ascii
   other than the name).

   (Thanks much to those several who looked at the above-mentioned
   included-files in the email, to say that the king who thought he
   had no clothes was in fact fully dressed, in full regalia!
   By the time I got those, I had already finally figured it out,
   but thanks, thanks, thanks!).

5. All this should probably be documented somewhere for new users
   who may love web crawling but not know much about 7-bit vs 8-bit,
   etc, but who want to look at foreign language stuff, and
   are stuck with something like sun's TIP (ancient).  Like I
   say, discovering it was not easy.

6. QUESTION: for those who like to read things ON PAPER, how are
   you supposed to PRINT this 8-bit stuff?  Like on HP4M, via
   postscript?  (If answer is simple, might document this too).

7. Sorry for all the commotion I caused to this super group
   of people who work so very, very hard improving this
   wonderful program.

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