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

[Ken Hornstein]

>I take back back what I said, earlier about the default format that my editor
>stored nmh bound files in. A few weeks, ago, I did change the default to
>UTF-8. But as of, Dec 14 2012, for files whose names are all digits and are in
>in my draft folder the default is overridden to ISO-8859-1. I don't know I why
>did that.

Well, that would explains things perfectly!

>Pending your instructions, I will not fix this problem. The two questions are
>what should be the storage charset be for files destined for nmh and should be
>the charset for other files.

Nmh assumes that text you give to it is the character set of your locale;
so if you have a UTF-8 locale, it assumes that the text you give it is
UTF-8 and will mark it appropriately.  Well, technically if the text is
only ASCII then it will mark it as ASCII, but if there are any 8-bit
characters it will then assume that it's in UTF-8.  You can override this
default with an mhbuild directive; if you were to put the following at
the beginning of your text:

#<text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

and "mime" the draft at the WhatNow prompt, it would label it as ISO-8859-1.
But that would be a pain.

So, what should your editor do?  Well, since nmh thinks your character
set is UTF-8 it would make the most sense to have your editor do that
for nmh files.

For your other files ... well, I guess that depends on what you want
to do.  My personal feeling is that the world seems to be migrating to
UTF-8 as a default, and unless there is a reason you cannot handle UTF-8
then that's the way you should go.  If you've changed your locale to
UTF-8 you've already told the traditional Unix utilities that's what
you're using.

>> How did you get the saved text from the saved editor file into nmh?
>
>I typed "s\n" into "whatnow". As will do, in a moment, after storing as UTF-8.

I was more thinking about what happened before that; I guess your default
editor that gets invoked by repl is norms-cool-editor?

--Ken