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4.3.2 How has this problem been solved in Fidonet?

This issue of special characters has been a problem for Fidonet in the past, but it has been solved by the Fidonet standard FSC 0054 and its successor, FSP 1013, so that you can now safely use special characters in Fidonet mail if your message editor supports FSC 0054. FSC 0054 basically works like this:

Every Fidonet editor that wants to be compatible with FSC 0054 must be delivered along with built-in or external character translation tables that tell the editor how it can convert text that contains special characters from one character set to another.

When composing a message using a FSC 0054 compliant editor, you have two choices: By default, the editor allows you to enter the full range of special characters that your computer supports, but when saving the message, the editor will use its character translation tables and convert your text into a 7 bit clean representation that can be displayed on all computers even if they don’t support FSC 0054. For example, a German sharp s would be converted into double s, an e with accent would be converted into an e without accent, a cyrillic soft a would be converted to its transliteration "ya", and so on. This is the maximum compatibility mode: It offers you the comfort of being able to write text just as you would in a letter, using all special characters that your language requries, but your mails will still be properly displayed on all computers. This might be an option for German users, but it certainly is not for Russian users, as the transliteration of cyrillic letters is not particularly easy to read.

The other (better) possibility is that your editor leaves the special characters that you typed in as is, or converts them to a common transport charset (like codepage 866 in Russia, or codepage 850 in Europe), but inserts a hidden kludge line, from here on referred to as the charset kludge, into the message, that designates which character the mails stored in the message are composed in. When your message is read on another computer by a Fidonet message reader that also supports FSC 0054, the message reader will see the charset kludge in your mail and then use its charset translation tables to convert your message into the character set that this computer uses. The consequence is that even if your computer and the computer of the receiver use different character sets, everything that you typed in will look just the same on the receiver’s screen than on yours, including all special characters that have been typed.

A particular note to all Russian users of Msged: In Russia, it has been commonly agreed on to transport all Fidonet mails in Codepage 866. So you might ask what you do need a charset kludge for - could not just MsgEd TE recode everything to codepage 866 when writing a mail and importing from codepage 866 when reading a mail, and not care about that kludge line? But imagine a user in Germany who wants to read Russian echomails. His mail editor needs a way to know if a mail that it is about to display contains German special letters, or if it contains Russian ones. (Or vice versa, imagine a Russian person who wants to leran the German or English language). Only if Russian mails contain the proper charset kludge (‘CP866’), it will be able to display both languages correctly.


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