I posted this on comp.mail.pine just a bit ago, but it occurs to me
that this could possibly be something for procmail on incoming messages
before _any_ newsreaders get hold of them.
Paul
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 17:43:30 -0400
From: Paul O Bartlett <pobart(_at_)access(_dot_)digex(_dot_)net>
Newsgroups: comp.mail.pine
Subject: Viewing Microsoft's Abominations
I will admit that I am being lazy and trying to pick somebody
else's brain. :-) I use Pine 3.96 under SunOS 4.1.4 with vt100
terminal emulation on my desktop comm package. Normally I view using
the ISO-8859-1/Latin-1 character set, although I can change that on
the fly. [NOTE: procmail v3.10; perl v5.003 available.]
Many times I have seen, as I am sure others have as well, in emails
and newsgroup postings funny characters where context would lead one to
think punctuation marks should be, especially various flavors of double
and backward and forward single quote marks. Something I commonly see
with my setup is circumflex-plus-uppercase-O-tilde.
As nearly as I can tell, such messages seem to be coming from naive
users employing that brain dead mess called Windows. They compose with
Microsoft Word, perhaps, and then cut and paste directly into a window
for sending email, not knowing that Word (or whatever) does jiggery
pokery internally, so that if they do not save the file first in ASCII
format, the jiggery pokery gets transferred directly into the message
that goes out into the 'net. Hence the garbage that appears, they not
knowing that what they see on their screen is not what others see.
(If they do know, they may not want to go through the extra steps
it takes to conform to international standards. Apparently the fine,
fine folks who brought us Windows, Internut Exploder, and NutScrape
seem to think that international standards apply to everybody else but
not to them.)
Does anyone have, which he or she is willing to share, a command
pipe or display filter which will translate these Microsoft horrors
into something humanly readable? [NOTE: pipe and display filter here
refer to Pine features.]
Thanks.
Paul <pobart(_at_)access(_dot_)digex(_dot_)net>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key
Home Page: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart