autochange of signs

[Werner Koch]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:40, georg.emberger at gmx.at said:

> I have a question - if I am writing an eMail in KMail and I want to change 
> some signs automatically (germans have their strange "Umlaute" like Ä Ö Ü... 
> they should be changed to some international AE OE or UE) - how I can manage 

You should never do that!

The times of plain 7 bit ASCII are loooooong ago.  For about two decades
transparent 8 bit encoding has been implemented nearly everywhere.  The
encoding used is Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) and sufficient for all Western
Europe languages.  MIME is also pretty old and defines standard ways of
encoding all kinds of encodings.  The most common case is
quoted-printable encoding and all MUAs today handle this really well.

In fact since a few years the UTF-8 encoding is gaining more and more
acceptance and all modern mailers use this as default.  UTF-8 is the
clean way of encoding all character sets as it is a way of encoding
Unicode - UTF-8 is upward compatible to plain old ASCI (ISO-646).
Remember that there are only a few hundred million people who can get
around with ASCII; but some billions need to use a more complex
characters set.

If you still want to butcher our Umlauts, you may run sed over the
text. Something like:

   sed 's/ä/ae/g; s/ö/oe/g; s/ü/ue/g'

Gnus has a way to run external commands like sed over its message
buffer; I guess Kmail has such a feature too.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner