Subj : Re: Charcter encoding nightmare. :)
To   : Fabio Bizzi
From : Vitaliy Aksyonov
Date : Sat Mar 09 2024 05:21 pm

Hello Fabio.

09 Mar 24 12:15, you wrote to All:

 FB> the recent discussions on utf-8 on this echo made me the intention to
 FB> solve the character encoding issues on my point.

First of all. GoldEd is not designed to work with Unicode. Period.
Some people make it kinda work, but I don't recommend it.

 FB> So I'm here to kindly ask you hints about the configuration.

 FB> I run my point on Linux Mint with this configuration:

 FB> bizzi@bizzi:~$ locale
 FB> LANG=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LANGUAGE=it_IT:en
 FB> LC_CTYPE="it_IT.UTF-8"
 FB> LC_NUMERIC=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LC_TIME=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LC_COLLATE="it_IT.UTF-8"
 FB> LC_MONETARY=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LC_MESSAGES="it_IT.UTF-8"
 FB> LC_PAPER=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LC_NAME=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LC_ADDRESS=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LC_TELEPHONE=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LC_MEASUREMENT=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LC_IDENTIFICATION=it_IT.UTF-8
 FB> LC_ALL=

Do not use UTF-8 locale for GoldEd. You shall either use some one-byte charset for GoldEd or run it under luit/screen.

something like:

LANG=it_IT.cp850 luit -encoding cp850 gedlnx -C/path/to/your/config
           ^^^^^________________^^^^^ - those shall be your locale. I'm not sure which one used in Italy.

or configure you terminal to use that locale and run golded directly without luit.

luit may be more convenient, because you don't need to mess with terminal settings.

 FB> This is the golded.cfg part for the charcter encoding:

 FB> // Path where the *.ESC and *.CHS files can be found.
 FB> Xlatpath /home/bizzi/husky/golded/charset/

 FB> XLATCHARSET CP850 UTF-8 850_UTF8.CHS

This line may work, ant you may even see messages in your Unicode terminal, but see what's happens next...

 FB> XLATCHARSET UTF-8 CP850 UTF8_850.CHS

GoldEd cannot convert from multibyte encodings. This line is useless. I'm also wondering where did you get UTF8_850.CHS file? It doesn't exist in GoldEd distribution.

 FB> GROUP UTF8
 FB>         xlatimport utf-8

xlatimport is used for messages which doesn't have kludge CHRS or CHARSET. And even if then it's useless, because GoldEd can't convert from UTF-8.

 FB>         member utf-8
 FB>         xlatexport utf-8

This might work depending on what xlatlocalset you have.

 FB>         origin UTF-8 enthousiast
 FB> ENDGROUP

 FB> If I start golded from a xfce terminal the accented characters shows
 FB> as a double "?" with inverted color.

 FB> If I start golded from putty with the ISO-8859-1 charcter encoding I
 FB> see the correct characters in golded, but all other people see garbage
 FB> in my messages.

Most of the European echoes uses cp437. You better set your xlatexport to cp437.

 FB> The golded configuration is taken from a well know article by Michiel
 FB> van der Vlist : "Training Golded to play UTF-8", so I suppose it
 FB> should be right. :)

 FB> Any hint? :)

Don't mess with UTF-8. It's not supported even if it "works" for some. Use one-byte charset and you'll have no issues.

Vitaliy

.... 640K ought to be enough for anybody
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20240305-beta
 * Origin: Aurora, Colorado (1:104/117)

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