No polish signs in mutt

makowka · 04-18-2017, 09:56 AM

Hello to all forum members

I have trouble with the mutt mail client. Yesterday I installed Debian Jessie, the system is ok, but the in the main view mutt does not show either Polish or German diacritic marks. When I want to put polish diacritic marks while composing new mail, mutt shows strange marks instead of polish signs (for example, "M-E~B" instead of "ł". Also all mutt messages are in English. Interestingly, when I write new mail, diacritic marks are there - that is, the console recognizes Polish characters. As a text editor I use the ne - nice editor. Can you help me?

DavidMcCann · 04-18-2017, 11:12 AM

This is a locale problem. Mutt needs to know that you want Polish messages and that your mail will not be plain ascii. This page should help:
http://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/MuttFaq/Charset

I think the locale you need is pl.utf8

makowka · 04-22-2017, 08:34 AM

It didn't help, mutt still shows ??? instead of polish or german special marks.
That is what the file INSTALL in the mutt source package mutt-1.8.2 says:

Quote:

Character set support
=====================

Mutt no longer contains functions for doing character set conversion.
Instead, it expects the iconv functions (iconv_open, iconv,
iconv_close) to be provided. Most up-to-date systems provide these
functions, often as part of the C library. If you are installing Mutt
on a system which does not have them, it is recommended that you
install Bruno Haible's portable libiconv library, which you can obtain
from:

ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/

Even if your system does provide the iconv functions, you might want
to install libiconv, as some systems provide only a very limited
version of iconv.

If you decide to use your system's iconv implementation, you may
need to tell mutt about implementation-defined names for some
character sets. Sample configuration files for various systems can
be found in the directory contrib/iconv/ in this source
distribution, and will be installed in the samples/iconv directory
as part of mutt's documentation.

How should I understand this?

BW-userx · 04-22-2017, 09:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by makowka

It didn't help, mutt still shows ??? instead of polish or german special marks.
That is what the file INSTALL in the mutt source package mutt-1.8.2 says:

How should I understand this?

Quote:

, it is recommended that you
install Bruno Haible's portable libiconv library, which you can obtain
from:

ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/

I'd give that a go ..
because

Code:

Even if your system does provide the iconv functions, you might want
to install libiconv, as some systems provide only a very limited
version of iconv.

then see if that fixes it.

makowka · 04-24-2017, 11:08 AM

Unortunately, I can't download the portable iconv library from the link (timeout). I will have to compile it by myself.

makowka · 04-27-2017, 02:04 PM

I have contacted mr Haible and he told me, that Debian already implements libiconv. So it is not necessary to compile it. Any ideas?

DavidMcCann · 04-28-2017, 11:47 AM

It may be that Debian is one of those systems whose iconv is limited. You can get the source from this site, which will not time-out:
http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/...nv-1.15.tar.gz

Of course, you could always switch from Mutt to something with built-in Unicode support, like Alpine
http://www.washington.edu/alpine/