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

[Paul Fox]

address@hidden wrote:
 > 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.
 > 

since you trust your editor, this is the suspicious step, to me, since
it depends on your terminal emulator and windowing system doing the
right thing:
 > 2. I copied and pasted some of your message from the terminal emulator
 > into my editor.

what happens if you do the above (just copy the a² + b² = c² line, for
testing purposes), then write your edit buffer out to a file, then:

    $ cat /tmp/a2b2c2  | hexdump -C

i get:
 00000000  61 c2 b2 20 2b 20 62 c2  b2 20 3d 20 63 c2 b2 0a  |a.. + b.. = c...|

paul

 > 
 > 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
 > 
 > _______________________________________________
 > Nmh-workers mailing list
 > address@hidden
 > https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers

=----------------------
 paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 70.5 degrees)