Text 15071, 83 rader
Skriven 2011-05-08 19:53:20 av Markus Reschke (2:244/1661)
  Kommentar till text 15057 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38.9)
Ärende: how can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?
===============================================================
Hi Maurice!

 MK> Understood but if the editor that created the message uses plain ol' 
 MK> 7
 MK> bit ascii code then it wou't matter what the kludge is set for it 
 MK> will
 MK> still be plain ol' 7 bit ascii characters.  No?

That would be "ASCII" ;-) Most message readers got a default setting if the
CHRS kludge line is missing.

 MK> Yet again understood but unless the sender is using the correct code 
 MK> to
 MK> produce the native language at your end it won't matter whatsoever or 
 MK> at
 MK> least it shouldn't.  Should it?

7 bit ASCII works for all readers. Should also be the setting of last resort. 

 MK> Now that you bring it up, I have seen my messages screwed up as to
 MK> displayed characters on some European sites.  If they used UTF-8 it
 MK> should be fine.  Same with any message you send this way but then I'd
 MK> have to switch the console font in order to get it correctly 
 MK> displayed
 MK> since the default font is set to display 7 bit ascii characters.  

That's based on the reader. It might use the exact character set of the CHRS
kludge line or some kind of conversion. The latter causes some trouble,
especially on special characters.

 MK> Also
 MK> even if I do happen to have a suitable font for your native language 
 MK> I
 MK> have doubts I'd know for sure what you are talking about.  I can
 MK> decipher some words in other languages but I doubt very much I'd 
 MK> truly
 MK> understand.

Since you got codepage 437, you won't see any umlauts (just some junk). With
codepage 850 you would. Or take cyrillic for examaple.

 MK> So it is possible to do but I am guessing it is a bad idea and I know
 MK> for sure that I won't let some silly Fido kludge to set anything here
 MK> automagically.  I make no apologies for that and I don't think I need 
 MK> to
 MK> send a kludge to tell anyone's two-bit OS what is obviously 7 bit 
 MK> ascii.

That's your personal decision. I like the CHRS kludge, because that way I can
read your message and also the messages from people using my native language.
The reader will choose the right character set to display the message. 

 MK> Right?  If not then something is horribly wrong.  UTF-8 should work 
 MK> out
 MK> fine.  I notice this msged seems to think;

UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding. That would screw up a lot of fido
software.

 MK> @CHRS: IBMPC 2
 MK> @CODEPAGE: 437

 MK> which I can tell you isn't correct but given that 7 bit ascii 
 MK> characters
 MK> will display correctly with those settings I am not concerned about 
 MK> it.
 MK> It all works out.

With msged you can choose:
- default character set for writing
- default character set for reading (missing CHRS kludge)
- aliases of character sets for reading
And there's a per-area setting for 7 or 8 bit.

Your default character set for writing is IBMPC 2 currently. And since IBMPC
has different codepages based on country/region mgsed adds the CODEPAGE kludge
to make it foolproof.

Regards,
Markus

--- Msged/LNX 6.1.2
 * Origin: *** theca tabellaria *** (2:244/1661)