CHARSET (5)            Miscellaneous Information             CHARSET (5)







NAME  

        charset - Description of HERMES character set policies 



DESCRIPTION  

        All  HERMES  software  supports the extended 8-bit character set

        known as "Latin 1"  or  "ISO  8859/1",  provided  the  character

        concerned  is  available  in  both  ISO  8859/1 and the Atari ST

        character set.  



        HERMES consideres all text files it deals with to be  either  in

        the "user" or in the "net" domain.  User domain files have (as a 

        rule)  CRLF-terminated  lines, and all 8-bit characters are from

        the Atari ST native  character  set.    Net  domain  files  have

        LF-terminated  lines,  and all 8-bit characters are from the ISO

        8859/1 character set.  



        All files that are either received from or transmitted to  other

        systems are  in  the  net  domain.    When reading mails or news

        articles, the text is converted to a user domain file.  



        When you submit a  user  domain  text  file  to  HERMES,  it  is

        converted to  a  net domain file.  The net (pun intended) result

        is that your site appears as using the ISO character set to  the

        outside  world, while you can use your favourite text editor and

        write special characters using the ST set.    All  this  happens

        transparently to you as a user.  



        The  boundary  between  the  user  and net domains separates all

        files HERMES programs write for their  own  use  (that  includes

        mailbox files and news articles in the news tree) from all files 

        HERMES  programs  write  for  your  use (e. g., when saving mail

        messages or  news  articles  to  files  out  of  pgus(1)q  viewing

        windows).  Remember not to mess with net domain files unless you 

        you what you are doing!  



        Some  files  (like  the  xhosts  and  news.def  files) cannot be

        identified as either user or  net  domain  files.    Such  files

        should  not  contain  any  8-bit characters, and can have either

        CRLF- or LF-terminated  lines  (as  user  domain  files  can  in

        general, as far as HERMES is concerned).  



BUGS  

        All  characters  in either character set that are not present in

        the other are mapped to "default" characters.  If you receive  a

        mail  that contains such characters, and reply to it, all quoted

        text in your reply  has  undergone  a  double  conversion,  thus

        munging  all  ISO  characters  that  are  not  present in the ST

        charcater set.  











Wed Mar 3 21:21:28 1993                                           Page 1