"Kerr-Mudd, John" <admin@127.0.0.1> writes:

> On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 06:53:47 -0600
> Charles Richmond <codescott@aquaporin4.com> wrote:

>> ISTM a few decades ago, a frozen body was found in the Alps, and the
>> Swiss and the French or maybe the Italians were arguing over who owned
>> the territory where that "ice man" was found, and thus had rights to the
>> "ice man" body. I do *not* remember how all that turned out...

> They named him Otzi; he got moved from Innsbruck to Bolzano.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Border_dispute

You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.

--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen

On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:57:45 +0000, Andy Burns wrote:
>
> Charles Richmond wrote:
>
>> Let's *not* call "12 PM Noon" redundant or silly... it is just
>> "emphatic", to avoid the misunderstanding of whether AM or PM is
>> noon.
>
> So just call it "12:00 noon" or "noon"

May be "high noon", and midnight "low noon", to confuse things a little
further. ;-)
--
Andreas

On 17 Jan 2023 22:14:54 GMT, greymaus wrote:
>
> In a recent election, there was a difference pointed out, that there
> were two sorts of people, those who had dinner at midday, and those that
> have it in the evening. Can't remember anything else about that
> election.

Election?

I seem to remember that mostly Germans have dinner ("main meal") at
midday, and many other cultures in the evening (also called supper?).

As for sorts of people in general, I only know there are 10 sorts of
people. These who understand binary, and those who don't.
--
Andreas

https://news-commentaries.blogspot.com/

On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>
> "Kerr-Mudd, John" <admin@127.0.0.1> writes:
>
>> On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 06:53:47 -0600
>> Charles Richmond <codescott@aquaporin4.com> wrote:
>
>>> ISTM a few decades ago, a frozen body was found in the Alps, and the
>>> Swiss and the French or maybe the Italians were arguing over who owned
>>> the territory where that "ice man" was found, and thus had rights to the
>>> "ice man" body. I do *not* remember how all that turned out...
>
>> They named him Otzi; he got moved from Innsbruck to Bolzano.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Border_dispute
>
> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.

Actually Ötzi.

Fun fact, later a guy from Austria called himself DJ Ötzi who had a
couple of (cover version) hits around 2000. Terrible in my opinion.
--
Andreas

On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 21:01:47 -0500, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:

> As for sorts of people in general, I only know there are 10 sorts of
> people. These who understand binary, and those who don't.

No, there are 11. Those who understand binary, those who don't, and those
who don't get the joke.

--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500
Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> wrote:

> "Kerr-Mudd, John" <admin@127.0.0.1> writes:
>
> > On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 06:53:47 -0600
> > Charles Richmond <codescott@aquaporin4.com> wrote:
>
> >> ISTM a few decades ago, a frozen body was found in the Alps, and the
> >> Swiss and the French or maybe the Italians were arguing over who owned
> >> the territory where that "ice man" was found, and thus had rights to the
> >> "ice man" body. I do *not* remember how all that turned out...
>
> > They named him Otzi; he got moved from Innsbruck to Bolzano.
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Border_dispute
>
> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
>

Ta, but I'm still very 7-bit. the Wikilink seems to have pasted in
something.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

On 2023-01-18, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500
> Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> wrote:
>
>> "Kerr-Mudd, John" <admin@127.0.0.1> writes:
>>
>> > On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 06:53:47 -0600
>> > Charles Richmond <codescott@aquaporin4.com> wrote:
>>
>> >> ISTM a few decades ago, a frozen body was found in the Alps, and the
>> >> Swiss and the French or maybe the Italians were arguing over who owned
>> >> the territory where that "ice man" was found, and thus had rights to the
>> >> "ice man" body. I do *not* remember how all that turned out...
>>
>> > They named him Otzi; he got moved from Innsbruck to Bolzano.
>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Border_dispute
>>
>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
>>
>
> Ta, but I'm still very 7-bit. the Wikilink seems to have pasted in
> something.

\tzi, then? :-)

--
Nuno Silva

On 2023-01-18, Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:57:45 +0000, Andy Burns wrote:
>
>> Charles Richmond wrote:
>>
>>> Let's *not* call "12 PM Noon" redundant or silly... it is just
>>> "emphatic", to avoid the misunderstanding of whether AM or PM is
>>> noon.
>>
>> So just call it "12:00 noon" or "noon"
>
> May be "high noon", and midnight "low noon", to confuse things a little
> further. ;-)

This discussion has reached its nadir.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.

On 2023-01-18, Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 21:01:47 -0500, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
>
>> As for sorts of people in general, I only know there are 10 sorts of
>> people. These who understand binary, and those who don't.
>
> No, there are 11. Those who understand binary, those who don't, and those
> who don't get the joke.

There are two kinds of people: those who believe that there are
two kinds of people, and those that don't.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.

Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> writes:

> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:

>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.

> Actually �tzi.

I assume that that's umlaut-o, but I've never gotten GNUS to display Unicode as
anything other than question marks or \ooo octals. I was told in German
classes 50 years ago that "ae", "oe", and "ue" were acceptable alternatives, if
somewhat outmoded.

--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen

On 2023-01-19, Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> wrote:

> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> writes:
>
>> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>>
>>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
>>
>> Actually Ötzi.
>
> I assume that that's umlaut-o, but I've never gotten GNUS to display Unicode
> as anything other than question marks or \ooo octals. I was told in German
> classes 50 years ago that "ae", "oe", and "ue" were acceptable alternatives,
> if somewhat outmoded.

Ditto for "ss". Meanwhile, I'm running Debian Bullseye with xfce -
everything displays just fine, even in a terminal window.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.

On 18 Jan 2023 21:29:59 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>
> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> writes:
>
>> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>
>>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
>
>> Actually Ötzi.
>
> I assume that that's umlaut-o, but I've never gotten GNUS to display Unicode as
> anything other than question marks or \ooo octals.

I always thought Gnus would handle Umlaut declaration automatically, but
seems (from your article) I was wrong.

You could try to add

(setq mm-coding-system-priorities '(iso-8859-1 iso-8859-15 utf-8))
(add-to-list 'mm-body-charset-encoding-alist '(iso-8859-1 . 8bit))

to your ~/.gnus file and restart Gnus.

As for usenet or mail, it's pretty much out of your control. If the one
you quote uses Umlauts, your reader must declare it to produce proper
results.

Btw. Charlie Gibbs' slrn handles Umlauts correctly (declares them),
because of the Ö in "Ötzi" in the quote.

> I was told in German classes 50 years ago that "ae", "oe", and "ue"
> were acceptable alternatives, if somewhat outmoded.

Probably. Being native German that was never an option. Although early
computers had no support for other than usascii.
--
Andreas

On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:20:06 -0500
Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:

> (setq mm-coding-system-priorities '(iso-8859-1 iso-8859-15 utf-8))
> (add-to-list 'mm-body-charset-encoding-alist '(iso-8859-1 . 8bit))

Why not just use utf-8 instead of the obsolescent iso-8859
encodings ?

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/

On 2023-01-17 14:06, Charles Richmond wrote:
> On 1/17/2023 6:27 AM, greymaus wrote:
>>
>          [snip...]         [snip...]         [snip...]
>
>> Why was the circle defined as 360 degress? The answer is probably buried
>> under the sands of Sumer. Some of the US soldiers that served in 'Iraq
>> said there are millions of cuniform tablets  still lying around there.
>>
>
> ISTM that anscient Sumeria used a base-20 number system, like the Mayans
> did.  And since the earth is *roughly* a round ball, and the measure of
> round things totals 360 degrees...

Was this a circular proof?

"Since a circle is 360 degrees, a round thing obviously have 360
degrees." Which at all does not explain why 360.

We do obviously also have the 400 degree unit/circle, as well as the
radian, in which a circle is roughly 6.28 radians.

Johnny

On 2023-01-19 06:20, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
> On 18 Jan 2023 21:29:59 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>>
>> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> writes:
>>
>>> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>>
>>>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
>>
>>> Actually Ötzi.
>>
>> I assume that that's umlaut-o, but I've never gotten GNUS to display Unicode as
>> anything other than question marks or \ooo octals.
>
> I always thought Gnus would handle Umlaut declaration automatically, but
> seems (from your article) I was wrong.

Nothing is ever easy with encodings...

Your post was in ISO-8859-1, Rich response didn't contain any
information at all about what encoding it should be in, however, it also
didn't change the content in any way, and reasonable heuristics would
figure out it's ISO-8859-1.

Your reply to Rich, finally, again was in ISO-8859-1.

Since Rich's post didn't have any content-type information, it seems
likely that Gnus also either isn't trying to look at any such
information and decode appropriately, or else it think it cannot display
such characters for some reason.

> You could try to add
>
> (setq mm-coding-system-priorities '(iso-8859-1 iso-8859-15 utf-8))
> (add-to-list 'mm-body-charset-encoding-alist '(iso-8859-1 . 8bit))
>
> to your ~/.gnus file and restart Gnus.

Worth trying, but I doubt it would solve it.

> As for usenet or mail, it's pretty much out of your control. If the one
> you quote uses Umlauts, your reader must declare it to produce proper
> results.

Your reader don't need to "declare" anything. It needs to understand
what the posted content is declared as, and process/display it
correspondingly.

> Btw. Charlie Gibbs' slrn handles Umlauts correctly (declares them),
> because of the Ö in "Ötzi" in the quote.

Yes, looked fine for me too (in Thunderbird). Since Rich post didn't
tell what encoding was used, it seems likely heuristics were used to
figure out it was in fact ISO-8859-1.

>> I was told in German classes 50 years ago that "ae", "oe", and "ue"
>> were acceptable alternatives, if somewhat outmoded.
>
> Probably. Being native German that was never an option. Although early
> computers had no support for other than usascii.

How early are you talking about? 50s and 60s? Because in the 70s,
ISO-646-DE existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646).

But I also seem to recall that in German, if not able to use the umlaut
letters, the "ae", "oe" and "ue" substitutes are perfectly acceptable.
And from a collating point of view, this is how the letters are collated
as well (in German).

Of course, it's all different if you go to Swedish for example. There,
these substitutes are not acceptable, and are not how the letters are
collated. Even though they are pretty much the same characters as in
German in other ways.

Johnny

On 2023-01-18 14:41, Nuno Silva wrote:
> On 2023-01-18, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:
>
>> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500
>> Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>> "Kerr-Mudd, John" <admin@127.0.0.1> writes:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 06:53:47 -0600
>>>> Charles Richmond <codescott@aquaporin4.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> ISTM a few decades ago, a frozen body was found in the Alps, and the
>>>>> Swiss and the French or maybe the Italians were arguing over who owned
>>>>> the territory where that "ice man" was found, and thus had rights to the
>>>>> "ice man" body. I do *not* remember how all that turned out...
>>>
>>>> They named him Otzi; he got moved from Innsbruck to Bolzano.
>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Border_dispute
>>>
>>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
>>>
>>
>> Ta, but I'm still very 7-bit. the Wikilink seems to have pasted in
>> something.
>
>
> \tzi, then? :-)

Yay! Someone who still remembers ISO-646-DE. :-)
(or -SE, -FI, or some other ones...)

Johnny

Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:

> On 2023-01-19 06:20, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
> > On 18 Jan 2023 21:29:59 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
> >> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> writes:
> >>> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
> >>
> >>>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
> >>
> >>> Actually Ötzi.
> >>
> >> I assume that that's umlaut-o, but I've never gotten GNUS to display
> >> Unicode as anything other than question marks or \ooo octals.
> >
> > I always thought Gnus would handle Umlaut declaration automatically, but
> > seems (from your article) I was wrong.
>
> Nothing is ever easy with encodings...
>
> Your post was in ISO-8859-1, Rich response didn't contain any
> information at all about what encoding it should be in, however, it also
> didn't change the content in any way, and reasonable heuristics would
> figure out it's ISO-8859-1.
>
> Your reply to Rich, finally, again was in ISO-8859-1.
>
> Since Rich's post didn't have any content-type information, it seems
> likely that Gnus also either isn't trying to look at any such
> information and decode appropriately, or else it think it cannot display
> such characters for some reason.
>
> > You could try to add
> >
> > (setq mm-coding-system-priorities '(iso-8859-1 iso-8859-15 utf-8))
> > (add-to-list 'mm-body-charset-encoding-alist '(iso-8859-1 . 8bit))
> >
> > to your ~/.gnus file and restart Gnus.
>
> Worth trying, but I doubt it would solve it.
>
> > As for usenet or mail, it's pretty much out of your control. If the one
> > you quote uses Umlauts, your reader must declare it to produce proper
> > results.
>
> Your reader don't need to "declare" anything. It needs to understand
> what the posted content is declared as, and process/display it
> correspondingly.
>
> > Btw. Charlie Gibbs' slrn handles Umlauts correctly (declares them),
> > because of the Ö in "Ötzi" in the quote.
>
> Yes, looked fine for me too (in Thunderbird). Since Rich post didn't
> tell what encoding was used, it seems likely heuristics were used to
> figure out it was in fact ISO-8859-1.
>
> >> I was told in German classes 50 years ago that "ae", "oe", and "ue"
> >> were acceptable alternatives, if somewhat outmoded.
> >
> > Probably. Being native German that was never an option. Although early
> > computers had no support for other than usascii.
>
> How early are you talking about? 50s and 60s? Because in the 70s,
> ISO-646-DE existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646).
>
> But I also seem to recall that in German, if not able to use the umlaut
> letters, the "ae", "oe" and "ue" substitutes are perfectly acceptable.
> And from a collating point of view, this is how the letters are collated
> as well (in German).
>
> Of course, it's all different if you go to Swedish for example. There,
> these substitutes are not acceptable, and are not how the letters are
> collated. Even though they are pretty much the same characters as in
> German in other ways.
>
> Johnny
>

More generally: Apple's character viewer describes Ö
as "Latin Capital Letter O With Diaresis". That character
is, of course, used in languages other than German.

--
\|/
(((Ï))) – Mr Ön!on
When we shake the ketchup bottle
First none comes and then a lot'll.

On 1/18/2023 8:29 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:
> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> writes:
>
>> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>
>>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
>
>> Actually Ötzi.
>
> I assume that that's umlaut-o, but I've never gotten GNUS to display Unicode as
> anything other than question marks or \ooo octals. I was told in German
> classes 50 years ago that "ae", "oe", and "ue" were acceptable alternatives, if
> somewhat outmoded.
>

ISTM UTF-8 character set supports umlauted and accented characters with
the codes between 128 to 255

--

Charles Richmond

--
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
www.avast.com

On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 08:23:12 -0600
Charles Richmond <codescott@aquaporin4.com> wrote:

> On 1/18/2023 8:29 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:
> > Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> writes:
> >
> >> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
> >
> >>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
> >
> >> Actually Ötzi.
> >
> > I assume that that's umlaut-o, but I've never gotten GNUS to display Unicode as
> > anything other than question marks or \ooo octals. I was told in German
> > classes 50 years ago that "ae", "oe", and "ue" were acceptable alternatives, if
> > somewhat outmoded.
> >
>
> ISTM UTF-8 character set supports umlauted and accented characters with
> the codes between 128 to 255

to the detriment of IBM Extended ASCII pretty box characters.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

On 2023-01-19, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
>
> But I also seem to recall that in German, if not able to use the umlaut
> letters, the "ae", "oe" and "ue" substitutes are perfectly acceptable.
> And from a collating point of view, this is how the letters are collated
> as well (in German).
>
> Of course, it's all different if you go to Swedish for example. There,
> these substitutes are not acceptable, and are not how the letters are
> collated. Even though they are pretty much the same characters as in
> German in other ways.

I suppose those substitutes are not formally acceptable, but I've seen
them used plenty in Swedish in a 7-bit environment.

Niklas
--
Keeping UUCP running is starting to seem a lot like keeping a 130-year-old
man who smokes 4 packs a day on life support because he's the last person
on Earth who knows how to do the cha-cha, but he won't tell anyone.
-- Ryan Tucker

On 2023-01-19 15:22, Mr Ön!on wrote:
> Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:

>> Of course, it's all different if you go to Swedish for example. There,
>> these substitutes are not acceptable, and are not how the letters are
>> collated. Even though they are pretty much the same characters as in
>> German in other ways.
>>
>> Johnny
>>
>
> More generally: Apple's character viewer describes Ö
> as "Latin Capital Letter O With Diaresis". That character
> is, of course, used in languages other than German.

Which is the Unicode name for it. Which in a way is unfortunate, since
we're then basically trying to describe the visual representation, and
not the letter.

This is one of my main gripes with Unicode. It conflates and mixes
semantics with visual representation. Sometimes you have the same
character used, which have different semantics depending on language and
context, and sometimes you have different characters just because of the
different semantics. And sometimes Unicode goes to silly extremes in
differentiating on visual differences that really don't make sense, such
as Green Book (U+1F4D7) as opposed to Blue Book (U+1F4D8). Why would
suddenly the color be a part of the Unicode character, and what is then
expected to happen if you have this is a text that is in red?

m might mean the latin letter lowercase 'm', but might also mean
"meter", which is a unit. But it's the same Unicode codepoint that is
supposed to be used.

On the other hand, Å is the letter "capital A with ring" (U+00C5), which
is a specific letter in Swedish. Then we have the unit "Ångström" (which
be written Angstrom by non-Swedes), which is a unit that is 10^-10
meters. But this one has it's own code point (U+212B). The unit was
named after the Swedish scientist Ångström
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom).

Why cannot Unicode even be consistent with itself on anything? It's just
the largest mess ever created. But by now we're stuck with it, and we're
going to suffer in eternity.

I don't even know how many different "a" there are in Unicode, but it's
excellent for anyone who wants to fool people into clicking on links
that leads to scams for example... It's almost impossible to properly
handle all the different strings that might appear the same, and which a
human will read as the same, but a computer might not.

Johnny

On 2023-01-19 15:23, Charles Richmond wrote:
> On 1/18/2023 8:29 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:
>> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> writes:
>>
>>> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>>
>>>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e":  His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
>>
>>> Actually Ötzi.
>>
>> I assume that that's umlaut-o, but I've never gotten GNUS to display
>> Unicode as
>> anything other than question marks or \ooo octals.  I was told in German
>> classes 50 years ago that "ae", "oe", and "ue" were acceptable
>> alternatives, if
>> somewhat outmoded.
>>
>
> ISTM UTF-8 character set supports umlauted and accented characters with
> the codes between 128 to 255

Technically, UFT-8 is not a character set, it's an encoding for the
Unicode character set, using a variable number of 8-bit bytes.

Unicode codepoints 0 to 255 are equal to Latin-1 (however, when using
UTF-8 only 0 to 127 are "compatible", which means just 7-bit ASCII). And
yes, there you have a bunch of characters with accents, umlauts, as well
as some other fairly common characters from western Europe at 160 to
255. (128 to 159 are non-printable characters.)

Johnny

On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 08:26:26 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>
> On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:20:06 -0500
> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
>
>> (setq mm-coding-system-priorities '(iso-8859-1 iso-8859-15 utf-8))
>> (add-to-list 'mm-body-charset-encoding-alist '(iso-8859-1 . 8bit))

Somebody canceling my article? It's gone here for some reason.

> Why not just use utf-8 instead of the obsolescent iso-8859
> encodings ?

There is a saying I cannot recall. Something about "not being
greedy". For my understanding Gnus is looking at the text and than
applies the "lowest" possible declaration.

One reason I do this is that some people still use software not capable
of dealing with "modern" stuff like UTF-8, while they can deal with
ISO8859-1.
--
Andreas

On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 14:19:12 +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>
> On 2023-01-19 06:20, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
>> On 18 Jan 2023 21:29:59 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>>>
>>> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> writes:
>>>
>>>> On 17 Jan 2023 19:57:05 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:
>>>
>>>>> You're missing an umlaut, or an "e": His new name is Oetzi, not Otzi.
>>>
>>>> Actually Ötzi.
>>>
>>> I assume that that's umlaut-o, but I've never gotten GNUS to display Unicode as
>>> anything other than question marks or \ooo octals.
>> I always thought Gnus would handle Umlaut declaration automatically,
>> but
>> seems (from your article) I was wrong.
>
> Nothing is ever easy with encodings...
>
> Your post was in ISO-8859-1, Rich response didn't contain any
> information at all about what encoding it should be in, however, it
> also didn't change the content in any way, and reasonable heuristics
> would figure out it's ISO-8859-1.

It doesn't matter what his writing has. It only matters if only a single
character appears. In this case Rich quoted the "Ö" I wrote. Thus it has
to be at least ISO-8859-1.

> Your reply to Rich, finally, again was in ISO-8859-1.

Which is correct.

> Since Rich's post didn't have any content-type information, it seems
> likely that Gnus also either isn't trying to look at any such
> information and decode appropriately, or else it think it cannot
> display such characters for some reason.

No heuristics, AFAIK. Gnus (or any other working newsreader) simply
checks if the text (no matter who wrote it, or if it's just a quote)
contains characters out of usascii, then applies the correct declaration.

>> You could try to add
>> (setq mm-coding-system-priorities '(iso-8859-1 iso-8859-15 utf-8))
>> (add-to-list 'mm-body-charset-encoding-alist '(iso-8859-1 . 8bit))
>> to your ~/.gnus file and restart Gnus.
>
> Worth trying, but I doubt it would solve it.

I'm sure it will. :-)

>> As for usenet or mail, it's pretty much out of your control. If the one
>> you quote uses Umlauts, your reader must declare it to produce proper
>> results.
>
> Your reader don't need to "declare" anything. It needs to understand
> what the posted content is declared as, and process/display it
> correspondingly.

That is not how mail and news was designed. All was designed around
usascii at first. Once the rest of the world caught up to computing and
used characters not fitting into the 7-bit scheme, other character sets
came to life, telling clients what to deal with.

A reader cannot just guess (well some try), because in different charsets
a certain position contains different characters.

[...]

>>> I was told in German classes 50 years ago that "ae", "oe", and "ue"
>>> were acceptable alternatives, if somewhat outmoded.
>> Probably. Being native German that was never an option. Although
>> early
>> computers had no support for other than usascii.
>
> How early are you talking about? 50s and 60s? Because in the 70s,
> ISO-646-DE existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646).

I refer to the first time I came in contact with printers for home
computers in the early 80s. They only printed characters in the 7-bit
range. So in Germany we had to use "oe" instead of "ö" for example.

> But I also seem to recall that in German, if not able to use the
> umlaut letters, the "ae", "oe" and "ue" substitutes are perfectly
> acceptable. And from a collating point of view, this is how the
> letters are collated as well (in German).

OK for me.

But still, if a text is not 7-bit clean (even if a "Ä" shows up in a
quote for example), they need to be declared in the header.
--
Andreas

Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 08:26:26 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:20:06 -0500
> > Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
> >
> >> (setq mm-coding-system-priorities '(iso-8859-1 iso-8859-15 utf-8))
> >> (add-to-list 'mm-body-charset-encoding-alist '(iso-8859-1 . 8bit))
>
> Somebody canceling my article? It's gone here for some reason.
>

E-S has a server issue; it will be down tomorrow from 06:00 to 09:00 UTC
to resync databases. See Ray's recent article in e-s.support.

[...]

--
^Ï^. Sn!pe – My pet rock Gordon just is.

No plan survives contact with the enemy.
~ Slava Ukraini ~