[26972] in Athena Bugs
mhshow can't display utf-8 mail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Fri Sep 22 02:35:46 2006
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Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 02:35:24 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@mit.edu>
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Hi,
If one tries to display an e-mail that has content-type text/plain and
charset utf-8 using 'show', they instead see characters represented as
M-x (where x is the low-order 7 bits of the correct character), even if
their locale is set to en_US.UTF-8, as it is on Linux Athena.
After much debugging, it turns out that this can be remedied by putting
the following line in ~/.mh_profile:
mhshow-show-text/plain: %ecat '%f'
This overrides the following line from /usr/athena/etc/mhn.defaults:
mhshow-show-text/plain: %ecat -v '%f'
The -v flag tells cat to visibly represent nonprinting characters. Its
inclusion in that file dates back to a change Bob made in January 2004 to
handle nonprinting characters, but at this point, it also prevents perfectly
acceptable characters in UTF-8 from displaying correctly.
Can we consider removing the -v flag from the default file, or is there
some better solution that will allow UTF-8 mail to be displayed correctly?
(As a side note, exmh somehow manages to display UTF-8 mail correctly, even
without this change.)
Mitch
