Re: lynx-dev special characters

[Leonid Pauzner]

16-Jan-99 23:13 Laura Eaves wrote:

> 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.

> The problem: The raw char codes I get when I type these alt
> sequences is different from what my friend gets; hence, we see different
> characters in each other's mail.

I can explain something. When you mean 8bit character (>128)
you should know the codepage name it is from
since there are lots of codepages with different mapping for >128.
This is opposite to 7bit characters which are unified.

When you exchange 8bit mail there are two ways:
1. (trivial) both sender and recipient use the same codepage for theirs mails.
2. they use an arbitrary codepages but the sender label his/her mail
with proper codepage name (MIME charset in the mail header)
and the recipient's mail agent translate text to recipients codepage,
using approximations if neccessary. The same Lynx does for 8bit HTML
when it translates from "document's charset" to "display charset".
This is done automatically, but need rather advanced agents on both ends.

> The weird part is that 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.

I guess the mail in iso-8859-1 charset, the same as "assumed document charset"
in lynx normally, but your "display charset" is from cpXXX range.

Additional keyboard problems may be for systems which know different codepages,
say MS Windows supports "windows" codepage and "dos" codepage,
so when you enter, say, alt234 you match the first but alt0234 match the second
(or vise versa, I may forget this mess.)


When you save mail to a file and see it with Lynx try to play with
"assumed document charset" parameter from options menu to see the difference.

Unfortunately, lynx sends email from "display charset",
I was trying to introduce "outgoing mail charset" in lynx.cfg
to set it to the most widespread value for recipient's convenient,
but this feature still not implemented.

Again, there is no "special characters" here,
just normal 8bit chars, french accents in your case.


> Also, when I type, say, alt135 (┤) 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, 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.

> Can someone tell me what is going wrong?  What does lynx do with special 
> chars?
> How do other people exchange mail with special chars?
> Merci beaucoup. (I don't know how to say thanks "in advance" in french...:)
> --le