Subj : all for one
To   : mark lewis
From : Maurice Kinal
Date : Sun Sep 01 2019 20:44:33

Hey mark!

 ml> but i was taking them as a whole and not in parts and pieces

From a cp437 terminal?  Not very likely it can differentiate 32-bit characters. 
 From what I have seen a 32-bit character will appear as four 8-bit characters 
on any terminal application no matter what it thinks the character set is ... 
unless you're on a utf-8 terminal using a crippled editor such as msged or 
golded which can display them as single characters and then it will break them 
when quoting them back.  That is what happened with me when I first started 
playing with the possibility of utf-8 fidonet messaging.

 ml> so how do you propose to do that from a BBS?

I don't.  I gave up on BBS's back around 1996-ish.  They were already out of 
step once MS broke their ansi terminals sometime before then.  They were never 
in sync with linux or any of the BSD terminals that I was aware of.  I did have 
a 'fix' for logging into ansi BBS's but I never did like it much.  As far as 
fidonet messaging goes I'd say offlining is it's only hope.  Nancy has the 
right idea.

 ml> what is sent to the user's terminal so the glyphs are properly
 ml> rendered in the editor as they are in the reader...

And what encoding would that be?  cp437?  I have yet to see that work across 
the board, nevermind utf-8.

Just for fun here is what dmidecode has to say about every motherboard for the 
last umpteen, 20-ish maybe more, years about this issue;

-={ ye olde cut n' paste starts }=-
BIOS Language Information
        Language Description Format: Long
        Installable Languages: 1
                en|US|iso8859-1
        Currently Installed Language: en|US|iso8859-1
-={  ye olde cut n' paste ends  }=-

IBM fscked up over 30 years ago (1988-ish) methinks and fidonet made the 
mistake of using their crap ever since, CP437 being the best evidence of that.  
Mind you MS totally screwed up iso8859-1 by making people believe in LATIN-1 
being iso8859-1 so even the ISO people didn't escape the so-called high/upper 
ascii scam.  :::an evil grin that no emoticon has [yet] been created for:::

Life is good,
Maurice

.... Don't cry for me I have vi.
--- GNU bash, version 5.0.11(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
 * Origin: Little Mikey's Brain - Ladysmith BC, Canada (1:153/7001)

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