Subj : chatsetalias
To   : Benny Pedersen
From : Tobias Ernst
Date : Sat Sep 07 2002 05:31 pm

Hi!

 BP> proberly yes, see forward to a fix in someway, i cant see cp866 
 BP> in the way it should be here, since most is funny grafix :)

 BP> or should my shell have codepage 866 before i start msged ?

Msged itself doesn't switch the codepage (Windows) resp. the terminal font. It 
is content with the font it is provided.

I see you are using Linux. Now, on Linux, usually, you will be using a ISO 
8859-1 font. Therefore, you were told in the installation instructions to use 
the "readmaps.is1" and "writmaps.is1" files as character set maps.

Now, if Msged finds a mail in codepage 866 (with CP866 charset kludge), it sees 
that this mail contains cyrillic characters, that are not contained in the ISO 
8859-1 font that you are using. Therefore, it transliterates the cyrillic 
characters from the mail into latin characters. There are official translation 
rules on how to write Russian language in latin letters, and Msged applies 
these rules in order to enable you to get the correct impression of the mail 
you are reading even though you are not using the most correct font.

This means: if Msged recognises, that the mail is written in CP866 (and if you 
have properly installed readmaps.is1 and writmaps.is1, of course), you will not 
see strange graphical characters, but instead latin letters that approximate 
the correct cyrillic ones.

In your case, this does not work because of the wrong charset kludge. You may 
try to add

CharsetAlias +7 CP866

in your config. Maybe this already helps. If not, tell me, then I will look 
into the source code and fix it.

Now, if you want indeed to see cyrillic letters and not latin ones, then you 
have of course to switch your terminal to a cyrillic character set. CP866 you 
won't find for Unix dues to some technicals reasons (there, the cyrillic 
letters are at a place where Unix traditionally has control codes). You will 
want to use a KOI8-R font instead. I recommend getting the "cronxy" package, 
which has many fonts in koi8-r encoding. 

Then, of course, you have to tell Msged that your terminal is not running ISO 
8859-1, but KOI8-R. To do so, you have to replace the readmaps.is1 and 
writmaps.is1 files and use readmaps.koi and writmaps.koi instead. Then, Msged 
will recode all mails with CP866 charset (and those with +7 FIDO if the trick 
from above works) from CP866 to KOI8-r and you will see the proper cyrillic 
letters.

Regards,
Tobias.

--- Msged/Darwin 6.1.1
 * Origin: We love MsgEd ... (2:2476/418.15)

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