lynx-dev French accents (was special char's)

[Philip Webb]

990116 Laura Eaves a ecrit: 
> The following is only partly lynx related
> but I'm hoping someone on this list can enlighten me
> as to what is happening so I can figure out how to proceed.

i certainly look forward to hearing a discussion of this:
i have got elm & Lynx handling French etc accents correctly
using Kermit between the U's IRIX 5.3 & my XT pretending to be a terminal.
 
> I've been trying to exchange email in French with a friend
> and so need to be able to print accented characters.
> My friend told me I could insert special characters
> by holding down alt and typing raw values in decimal on the numeric keypad.
> Example:  alt138  should print e with a grave accent over it.

i never tried this before, but indeed i get something this way,
tho' not what you say: ie  h , which is the 7-bit equivalent of e-grave;
i'm using a simplified version of Emacs, which would write it  \350 ,
if it had originated via the Internet, eg an FT news story.
 
> The problem: The raw char codes I get when I type these alt sequences
> are different from what my friend gets;
> hence, we see different characters in each other's mail.
> The weird part is when I display her mail by catting it to the screen
> I get mostly greek and mathematical chars,
> but when I display the mail using lynx I get the correct characters.
> Also, when I type, say,  alt135  ( ‡ )

which i see as  \207 , but should be  \347  for c-cedil.

> on the command line I get c with a comma below it (what I want)
> but when I put this in a file and run it through lynx it displays nothing.
> When I type  alt231  on the command line I get a Greek letter tao,

is that a misprint for `too' or the Greek letter `tau' (a little `t')?

> but when I put this in a file and run lynx
> it displays the c with the comma below it, which is what I want.

> How do other people exchange mail with special chars?
> Merci beaucoup. (I don't know how to say thanks "in advance" in french...:)
 
`Merci en avance', mais c'est une affectation trop polie ...

anyway, which editor are you using & what OS & communications software?
check first for 7-bit translations, then for charset mismatches;
Kermit has very strong abilities for handling different charsets
& is very easy to use & free: i recommend it.

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