REPLY: 1:3634/12.73 5d6c1e35   
   MSGID: 1:153/7001 5d6c2db1   
   CHRS: UTF-8 4   
   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)   
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