It has come to my attention...
...that Baurjan Ismagulov said on Wednesday, Aug 28 2002:
> Example: let's take a message encoded in iso-8859-1 and containing the
> character '�' (LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA, octal code 347). The
> following table outlines how the message is displayed with different
> LC_CTYPE and charset values on a system with (hopefully) properly
> configured locales (mutt 1.4.0-2 on Debian unstable):
[...]

Hmm, interesting, I have a Debian machine at home, but I check my
mail on a RedHat 7.1 machine at work.  My locale, including my
LC_CTYPE variable, is always set to "en_US", therefore I didn't notice
this problem.  Another thing; I've kept my locale at this value but
changed the $charset to euc-jp to read and write to Japanese
correspondents in a kterm, without problems.

[...]
> Here LC_CTYPE and charset are the environment and mutt variables,
> respectively. "Mutt shows" column lists what mutt is actually
> displaying. "User wants" and "user expects" show what I call "override":
> the charset to be assumed by mutt given the two variable values, and the
> character that, IMHO, should be displayed by mutt according to the
> charset assumed.

Try keeping your locale to en_US.ISO8859-1.  I think, provided
LC_CTYPE allows for 8-bits, you should be able to set $charset to
something different from LC_CTYPE, without problems.  At least, I'm
able to do this with $charset=euc-jp.

> At the moment, I can see neither any useful application of ? and \347
> distinction, nor the relation between LC_CTYPE and charset -- I
> certainly cannot call it "override". Seems to me as if it was some side
> effect of code layering inside mutt.
>
> And the logic I propose is:
> 1. if charset is set, assumed_charset = charset;
>    otherwise, if LC_CTYPE is set, assumed_charset = LC_CTYPE;
>    otherwise, assumed_charset = "us-ascii".
> 2. * display ccedilla if it can be displayed with assumed_charset;
>    * display ? if it can't.
>
> I don't insist my scheme is "better" since I don't know the rationale
> behind the current design. However, I see much user confusion with this
> issue and think it could be made more simple, more stupid the way I've
> desribed.
>
> What do you think?

I'll admit, $charset was a confusing variable for me, and the manual
section on it is rather sparse.  Perhaps additional documentation on
it would help.

>
>
> With kind regards,
> Baurjan.

--
--Sam
UC Davis, California USA

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