[Info-vax] VMS-based InfoServer

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <alpine.LFD.2.00.1008051253570.29621 at libra.gmcl.internal>,
Rob Brown <mylastname at gmcl.com> writes: 

> On Thu, 5 Aug 2010 at 17:50 -0000, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
> >
> > In article <4c5af098$0$32458$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>, JF Mezei
> > <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
> >>
> >> While the rest of the world may say 20?, in the USA, despite it 
> >> being english, they will say 68?.  Still needs a charactere whose 
> >> value is higher than 127.
> >
> > Your 8-bit degree sign is visible to me as such without any QP.
> 
> Oh is that what it is?  I just see a question mark.

That is because your software is not interpreting it correctly whereas 
mine is.  :-)

This is a SEPARATE PROBLEM, though.  There is no standard 8-bit 
character set, so there is no "right" solution.  (However, assuming 
ISO-Latin-1 if nothing else is specified is correct well over 99% of the 
time.)  VAXman and I complain about 7-bit printable ASCII being encoded.

> VMS 7.1 Alpha on a DEC 3000-400 workstation, telnet to linux, where I 
> run alpine 2.00 to read newsgroups.  I have absolutely *no* idea who 
> is changing the degree sign to a question mark.  I don't see anything 
> in the headers to indicate character set or encoding (but I am not so 
> familiar with news headers).

I suspect it is alpine 2.00, your terminal emulator or some "smart" 
conversion on the fly somewhere along the line.  

It is up to everyone what software he uses to read newsgroups with.  
However, when quoting another post, he shouldn't change the characters.
(It is possible that the question mark is displayed but if you quote the 
text the original character (B0 in hex, 176 in decimal) will be 
preserved.)

> Where can I look to find the message before it got munged by all the 
> stuff I need to read it?

Many newsreaders will display stuff as it is on the NNTP server.  IIRC, 
Google Groups has a "show in original format" option somewhere.