Jungshik Shin writes:
> Most of time
> I invoke my mail client Pine under Korean xterm "Hanterm" (which can
> support three encodings, EUC-KR, UTF-8, and JOHAB). However, its support
> of UTF-8 is limited to all Hangul syllables along with Chinese characters
> and symbols defined in KS X 1001. So, when I get an email in ISO 8859-1
> (containing characters with acute/grave accent and so forth) or UTF-8
> (with lots of characters outside the repertoire of 11,172 Hangul syllables
> plus Chinese characters and symbols in KS X 1001), I need to open an
> xterm to reat that email. If xterm can understand the announcement of
> the encoding we're talking about, I can make Pine automatically switch
> (with the conditional invocation of 'display filter') encodings depending
> on MIME charset of email messages
We made the UTF-8 xterm, and the iconv() converters, exactly for this
kind of situation, so that people can read ISO-8859-1 and EUC-KR and
JOHAB emails in the same X window.
The drawbacks of the encoding-switching approach are well known:
- When pine dumps core, it leaves your terminal in an unusable
state,
- Internationalized error messages printed while pine is active
are incorrectly displayed,
- The escape sequences for switching encodings are not standardized.
Just use an UTF-8 xterm. mutt has support for converting emails in
ISO-8859-1 and EUC-KR automatically to UTF-8 for display. This is a
much lighter solution than switching the terminal.
The idea of applications randomly switching the terminal's encoding
reminds me the mess in the DOS era when applications were randomly
switching the graphics card resolution. It is the same kind of problem.
Bruno
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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