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

[Klaus Weide]

On Sun, 17 Jan 1999, Laura Eaves wrote:
> 
> I have a DOS PC logged onto a UNIX (BSDI) shell account.
> Lynx is set up with
>       assumed charset iso-8859-1
>       display charset cp437
>       raw 8-bit       OFF
> This displays mail from my friend correctly.
> 
> However, when I send mail to her the chars
> don't display right on her PC (running win95
> using IE, whose settings I don't know).
> Also, curiously, the raw 8-bit values in her
> email messeges to me don't match the values
> she types using alt.  For example, when she
> types alt135 (0x87), I get 0xe7.
> 
> Perhaps the easiest solution would be to use the 7-bit approximations.
> But it would be nice to see the 8-bit symbols.

You should make what your PC sends to AND receives from the Unix
system agree with what the Unix system thinks about character
encoding.  Everything else would be just hacks around the problem,
which may or may not work with specific programs.

Since you want to work with Unix tools (like vi), which probably are
making ISO-8859 assumptions (unless you configure them differently, if
possible at all), that means your PC should send characters AND
receive characters in ISO-8859-n encoding, where n probably is 1 for
you.  If you could teach the Unix shell that you are using a PC
character set, say by using a special locale setting, and all the
programs you use knew about that, then things would be different, but
I very much doubt that that's possible.

I know of 3 ways to make your PC send and receive ISO-8859-1 (and
still display correctly):

1) Use a comm program which does the translation for you.  Ditch the one
   you are using, unless it can be mode to do such translation; use
   Kermit instead (and set it up correctly).

2) Configure your PC to load and use a ISO-8859-1 codepage.  That stuff
   is out there, see the info related to Code Page 819 in
   Linkname: ISO-8859 briefing and resources
        URL: http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/iso8859/iso8859-pointers.html

3) Use your comm program within MS Windows in a DOS window.  Again, see the
   URL above, especially the MS Windows section.  That section also has some 
   explanation of characters entered with ALT codes.
   
These are alternatives; no need to use them together.  It's up to you...

P.S. There are links to this stuff in some of the files in the test directory.

      Klaus