Displaying different character sets on console

Displaying different character sets on console

[David Sumbler]

I run Emacs 21.3 and Gnus v5.10.6 on a utf-8-enabled console (i.e. not
under X).

I have an e-mail which contains some Greek characters.  The headers
include the lines:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-2022-JP
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

The default console font on my Fedora Core 2 system is
latarcyrheb-sun16, which does not include Greek characters.

I have tried doing Meta-! setfont gr928a-8x16 and suchlike, but I get an error:

putfont: KDFONTOP: Operation not permitted

What do I need to do to display such a message correctly?

David

-- 

David Sumbler

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Re: Displaying different character sets on console

[Adam Sjøgren]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:25:54 +0000, David wrote:

> I have an e-mail which contains some Greek characters. The headers
> include the lines:

> Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-2022-JP
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I am curious as to why the headers specify a Japanese charset to
tranfer Greek letters?

 "Introduction

   This document describes the encoding used in electronic mail [RFC822]
   and network news [RFC1036] messages in several Japanese networks. It
   was first specified by and used in JUNET [JUNET]. The encoding is now
   also widely used in Japanese IP communities.

   The name given to this encoding is "ISO-2022-JP", which is intended
   to be used in the "charset" parameter field of MIME headers (see
   [MIME1] and [MIME2])."

    <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1468.html>


  Best regards,

-- 
 "Spread your love like a fever                               Adam Sjøgren
  Don't you ever come down"                              asjo@koldfront.dk

Re: Displaying different character sets on console

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an séú lá is fiche de mí Eanair, scríobh Adam Sjøgren: 

 > I am curious as to why the headers specify a Japanese charset to
 > tranfer Greek letters?

Because Mule was implemented in a way that’s very friendly to ISO 2022,
which specified a universal character encoding a couple of decades before
Unicode. So the natural Mule way to encode a non-ASCII character in a mail
is to write it using ISO 2022 and to specify iso-2022 as the MIME
charset. (The -jp is defaulted to because Mule was implemented in Japan; it
could equivalently be -kr or -cn.)

Of course, outside East Asia, very little software understands ISO 2022, and
for the sake of recipients’ clients’ it should have used iso-8859-7 or
UTF-8.

-- 
“Ah come on now Ted, a Volkswagen with a mind of its own, driving all over
the place and going mad, if that’s not scary I don’t know what is.”