Re: [Nmh-workers] I like neither green eggs and ham nor MIME

[norm]

Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:

> I'd like to understand how that happened so we can
> fix it in the future (I am guessing maybe this happened in your editor).
> Norm, which editor are you using to compose/reply to email?  Are you
> using anything like replyfilter? (You would have had to configure that).
> Anything you can tell us about your setup would be useful.

To to best of my 82 year old mind's recollection, I did exactly what I am
doing now:

1. I displayed your message using mhshow onto a terminal emulator.

2. I copied and pasted some of your message from the terminal emulator
into my editor.

3. From my editor I:

4. Used a regular expression filter, built into my editor, to prepend
"<" to each line of your text.

5. Used a fill filter, built into my editor, on the result.

6. Interspersed text of my own.

7. Stored the result in UTF-8.

"My editor" is a 25 year old program, I write (note the tense) myself. It was
originally written in C, but I ported it to Java about 10 years ago. I use it
for pretty much everything, including program development and EMail. Its
source is now about 25,000 lines of mostly Java and some C. Interanlly, it
can represent any ISO character.

I have a vast choice of formats to write to external media. But, my editor
now, defaultly requires that all characters that I am writing can be
represented in the format chosen. A few weeks ago, I changed the default
output format from US-ASCII to UTF-8, because I was receiving more and more
text that was not ASCII. I did so very reluctantly, because I am loathe to
sprinkle non-ASCII characters in my file system. But I had to give in to
external pressures from my friends and relatives. I had been applying a filter
that converted non-ASCII characters into ASCII strings.

UTF-8 has the virtue that it represents ASCII characters in ASCII. But now you
tell me that not even UTF-8 is good enough. So what format do you want me to
use to for writing EMail destined text?

Note: I have not yet figured out how to install the optional repl software. I
plan to someday.

    Norman Shapiro