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Re: [TCLUG:1981] Chinese e-mail from Linux?



 > On Tue, 27 Oct 1998, Forrest Cahoon wrote:
> 
> > Hello, everybody.
> > 
> > I've recently become interested in the Chinese language, and have been
> > trying to figure out how to send Chinese e-mail from my Linux box.
> 
> What kind of Chinese you use, traditional Chinese or Simplied Chinese ?
> If you use traditional Chinese, there are a lot of rpm files in
> ftp://linux.sinica.edu.tw/pub2/CLE-0.5/CLE/binary/i386 , including an
> emacs/mule. Maybe you can use alien to transfer them to .deb. 

I'm using Simplified; my friends who are teaching me Chinese are from PRC.

The emacs 20.2 that came with Debian 2.0 includes mule (allowing you to
read Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many other languages) but lacks
leim (Library of Emacs Input Methods) needed to enter text in those
languages.  I guess a .tw site would probably have everything needed to
write Chinese, but instead I built all of emacs from souce, including
leim, upgrading to 20.3 in the process.  It was very educational. :-)

I have successfully sent Chinese e-mail to one of my friends, who uses
NJStar on a Win-something box and reads her e-mail on hotmail with a
browser.  (Whether my Chinese is correct or not is another issue.) 

One thing still confuses me, though: when I go to save my buffer
containing Chinese to mail from mutt, emacs presents me with this
warning:



The target text contains the following non ASCII character(s):
           chinese-gb2312: (ANR:CB
These can't be encoded safely by the coding system undecided-unix.

Please select one from the following safe coding systems:
  cn-gb-2312 iso-2022-cn iso-2022-cn-ext hz-gb-2312 iso-2022-7bit
  iso-2022-8bit-ss2 emacs-mule raw-text iso-2022-7bit-lock-ss2
  iso-2022-7bit-ss2 iso-2022-7bit-lock compound-text




(I think my Chinese characters lost some control characters above, when
I pasted in from my emacs buffer.)

The default encoding it suggests is cn-gb-2312, but I've been choosing
iso-2022-7bit, because "7bit" sounds safer for e-mail.  My friend
evidently decoded it with NJStar, but shouldn't the character set
really be specified in the MIME header somewhere?  And ... what are all
those different encodings, really?

-- 
| Forrest Cahoon      | forrest@pconline.com |------------------------------|
| 850 21st Ave SE     |----------------------| Only unbalanced people       |
| Mpls MN  55414-2514 |                      |        can tip the scales... |