On 20 Mar 01 at 1:05, owner-arachne-digest@arachne wrote:
>Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 00:37:25 -0500 (EST)
>From: "Thomas Mueller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: New email format?
>
>Does Latin II include Cyrillic letters? If not, how do you read Russian without
>Cyrillic characters? Is it an awkward transliteration? I can read most Latin 1
>with extended US-ASCII, code page 850, but I have to mentally translate, knowing
>the letters are not all what they look like. e with acute accent looks like
>Greek theta, for instance. OS/2 appears strongly geared to US code pages,
>very difficult to switch back and forth.
Thomas,
if you use 8bit characters in email under DOS, you will probably have
to do conversion, at least between the ISO-8859-1 codepage and the
DOS cp850 (or cp437). And it is the same if you have friends who
give you their text on a floppy - and these friends use another very
popular OS.
Conversion of codepage should be done by the email program. The
Pmail solution depends on a couple of conversion tables which are
available as add-ons to the main program. These tools do not change
the program interface (it is still English), but they look at the
mail headers and find out in which 8bit codepage the message has
been written. Then it converts the upper characters (ASCII>127) to
the upper characters of your installed codepage.
Example
The message header contains:
| Content-Type: text/plain;
| charset="koi8-r"
| Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
If I have installed CP866 (ancient IBM Russian codepage), all
cyrillic letters will display correctly. PMail automatically converts
from Unix-Cyrillic to DOS-Cyrillic codepage. I do not use this
codepage ofen because the East European or German diacritical
characters cannot be displayed.
If I have running West European character set CP437, Pmail gives me
a transcription for the Cyrillic letters:
| RUSSKAÄ PRAVOSLAVNAÄ CERKOV'
| SLU?BA KOMMUNIKACII
| OTDELA VNE?NIX CERKOVNYX SNO?ENIJ
| MOSKOVSKOGO PATRIARXATA
| Rossiä, Moskva, Danilovskij val 22, Sväto-Danilov monastyr', OVCS
This is not without problems, but a very good approximation.
- you have to get used to the transcription: eg. ä is what you would
transcribe as 'ya' into English. x is the Russian 'ch', that is
generally transcribed as 'h'
- Pmail tries a one-to-one transcription, but this is not always
possible: The word sluzhba is transcribed as slu?ba, because it
affords more than one letter.
The second problem can partly be solved by using a East European
codepage (Latin II). As it contains letters as accented c (English
'ch') or accented s (English 'sh') you get a one-to-one
transcription for most Cyrillic letters. But there are exceptions
too: the letter 'shch' is still rendered by a question mark. (I
wonder whether I am allowed to manipulate the conversion tables. I
have not tried this yet. In a text message it would not matter to
replace one by two characters...)
Result: If I want to work further with these texts, I will have to
convert them properly. That means to a codepage, that includes the
same language, because all letters must have an equivalent. East
European Windows to East European DOS or Russian unix to Russian
DOS. But if I just want to read just one Russian email amidst a lot of
Czech oder German ones the Pmail's automatic conversion does a good
job.
Arachne has not this capability. If I have the Latin I or Latin
II fonts installed any Russian text display as garbage. Arachne on
the other hand makes it possible to change font and keyboard mapping
(and probably other features) with two keystrokes (one to load
another font apm, one to return to the last page. This is very nice,
too.
Regards
Christof Lange
________________________________________________________________
Českobratrská církev evangelická - Betlémská kaple na Žižkově
Prokopova 4/216, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
Tel. 22 78 06 73 - E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
