Forwarded message:
From: Self </lange>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Cyrillic characters
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 22:48:42
>Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 23:11:13 +0000
>From: "Geoff Barnard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Cyrillic characters
Hello, Geoff,
now finally on editing national characters.
My comment has two parts.
1. Do not use Arachne for email...
----------------------------------
>e-mails from Russia, and viewing most Russian WWW pages (although I have
>seen some that clearly use a different character set.
If you are not just playing with mail, but produce and read big
quantities of text, I would recommend to you applications which are
made for this rather than Arachne. Running under DOS they
naturally use DOS codepages (either KOI8-R or CP866) and your
dual English-Russian keyboard configuration. This does not matter, as
far as the output is okay. According to international mail standards
the outgoing mail files (in Arachne *.TBS) must not contain
8Bit code at all - neither DOS nor WWW character sets, but the
8bit characters encoded into 7bit.
The mail header contains this:
...
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-2" * -> in your case iso-8859-5 *
... Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
...
followed by a partly unreadable text - every character above 128 is
substituted.
This is what can be created by Arachne, but even by any other DOS mail
client, provided that it supports MIME.
>I have some programs that will do this within DOS (text mode) and they
>work fine. BUT they do NOT work when I run Arachne (different
>character set in graphics mode ?).
>Lacking anything else, I can always create a program to write the e-
mail
>text in DOS outside of Arachne, that insert the message into Arachne
for
>sending - but I'd like to keep things within Arachne.
Just this is *not* possible: you cannot import the text written in
a DOS application into Arachne's editor. Charactersets would get
mixed up. You will have to convert the imported text to the codepage
Arachne uses.
What *is* possible: Save outgoing emails in a Arachne's format as
*.TBS and have it sent by Arachne while online. That means: use
Arachne just as a gateway.
I personally prefer Pegasus Mail that has a fantastic support for
national characters in MIME (Russian mail will be displayed in
cyrillic, if you set the codepage to CP 866. When a West or Central
European codepage is selected, the Russian text is transcribed to
English or Czech alphabet. The program is free, international
character sets are included in a separate package. Using Arachne as a
gateway allows viewing incoming mail in Arachne, first. If they are
not readable here, in Pegasus, they certainly will be.
2. ... but Arachne's editor is great!
-------------------------------------
You noticed, I just do not like Arachne's mail modules very much.
On the other hand Arachne's internal text editor is great. On the
Arachne's second options page (options / local seconds) you have the
opportunity to define your own keyboard. So everything that can be
displayed, can be typed, too.
Actually I did not check this out for cyrillic. This will be probably
your task. Wheras Czech language mainly uses keys at the border of
the keypad to access its numerous diacritical characters, you have
the problem that the whole alphabet is above code 128... Is
it possible to preserve English keyboard and to map a complete
cyrillic keyboard in addition?
With best wishes
Christof Lange
_______________________________________________
Christof Lange
Prokopova 4, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
phone: (+420-2) 22 78 18 00 / 22 78 20 02
fax: (+420-2) 22 78 18 01
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov
