Mutt and UTF8

[Shot (Piotr Szotkowski)]

Hello.

Andrew Pollock:

> On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 08:41:51AM +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:

> > I am wondering whether my recent problems with Mutt may have anything to
> > do with the fact that I switched my hoary system to use UTF8 (as was
> > suggested in Ubuntu Traffic). I get an obscene amount of spam that's
> > written in other encodings (Chinese? Japanese?), and Mutt used to
> > happily show them, I couldn't read a single word, but still they were
> > shown. After the switch it seems Mutt has more problems with those
> > mails--the list view gets screwed up when highlighting mails forcing me
> > to use ^L a whole lot to clear things up. Once I've deleted all
> > unreadable spam Mutt works as perfect as ever.

But it happens only in gnome-terminal, and
doesn't happen in, say, uxterm, right?

> > Anyone seeing similar behaviour? (Or am I the only one who favours
> > good old Mutt over all the graphical mail readers out there?)

I thought it might be gnome-terminal issue...

> I've seen this as well, running Mutt inside
> screen and using PuTTY on a Windows box.

...but this got me thinking that maybe it's mutt's fault, after all.

> My theory was something to do with the fact that some characters were
> double-byte and the width of two characters was being used, when the
> character was really only one character wide, which then threw all
> sorts of line-wrapping stuff into a spin. But that's just a theory
> of someone who is not at all clued on the ins and outs of UTF-8.

My theory is simpler, although bases on the same presumptions. IMHO
the catch is that mutt chops the lines at calcluated byte boundaries,
without checking whether it doesn't chop a double-byte character in
the middle.

OTOH, other terminals (like uxterm) doesn't seem to care and render
mutt properly; also, refreshing (through ctrl-l) gnome-terminal makes
it render mutt correctly.

After all, I believe again it's a bug in gnome-terminal (but I'm not
as sure as I was before), and I think it's important to track it in
time for Hoary - we need as smooth an UTF-8 system as we can get.

Cheers,
-- Shot (hoping that mc 4.7 will make it into Hoary as well)
-- 
              We're back to the times when men were men and wrote
              their own device drivers.         -- Linus Torvalds
================================================ http://shot.pl/hovercraft/ ===
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