How do I configure Pine to use international characters?

Note: Pine is not available on any central UITS systems. UITS does not support the use of Pine at Indiana University.

Note: The software discussed here is no longer in common use at Indiana University, and UITS may no longer be able to verify the document's accuracy. The UITS Support Center may no longer have the manuals and other materials required to support this software adequately.

Note: This document assumes that the international characters you want to view in Pine are from Western European languages. For other languages, use character sets appropriate for their writing systems. Also, the terminal program you are using with Pine must support international characters to properly display them.

To configure Pine to use international characters:

1. From Pine's Main Menu, press  s  for Setup, and then  c  for Config.
   
   
2. Press  w  to start a WhereIs search, and enter: character-set

   The "character-set" setting should now be highlighted.

3. Press  a  for Add and then enter: ISO-8859-1

   The line should now look like this:

   character-set = ISO-8859-1

   This tells Pine to accept and understand characters in the ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) character set. Pine will now pass special characters to the terminal without stripping off the additional information that distinguishes them from plain ASCII text.

4. Press  e  to exit the Setup Configuration menu and return to Pine's Main Menu. When prompted to save your changes, press  y .

You also need to tell your terminal program about the international character set. How you do this depends on your terminal program. You should look for an option labeled Preferences, Options, or Settings. Once you find the character set option, set it to ISO-8859-1 or ISO-LATIN-1. This will cause your terminal program to properly interpret international characters it receives. If you can't find a character set option, you might find a place to set your terminal type to VT100 or VT220. The VT220 terminal is supposed to have the ISO-8859-1 character set built in.

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