[Mailman-Users] Does mailman 2.1.18 support hebrew language ?

[Xie, Wei]

Mark,

First, thank for your explanation in  detail.

Second, Let me tell you what current settings related to digest.

1) In the member option page http://WEBSERVER/mailman/options/LISTNAME/<this user>, there is one setting "Get MIME or Plain Text Digests?", current setting is "Plain Text";
     In same page, the setting " What language do you prefer?" is "English(USA)" but there is a drop-down list including language "Hebrew";

2) In the list admin Language options page, the setting "default language for this list" is set to "English(USA)", the setting "Languages supported by this list" is set to "English (USA)" and "Hebrew";
     In same page, the setting " When receiving digests, which format is default?" is "Plain", but I see the note "(Edit mime is default digest)";

3) In file Defaults.py, I see the following setting about English (USA). But in mm_cfg.py, there is no customized setting about English (USA).

add_language('en',    _('English (USA)'),       'us-ascii',    'ltr')


Third, the below is my questions about three choices.

1)      If users subscribe to the MIME format digest, each message will be in a separate message/rfc822 MIME part and will retain its original encoding.

      Questions - do you mean this customer can change setting "Get MIME or Plain Text Digests?" to "MIME" in above member options page I mention?  No need to change other customer settings?
                              Can the setting ensure this customer is able to read English and Hebrew in same message

2)      If you set the list's preferred_language to Hebrew on the list admin Language options page, the plain text digest will be utf-8 encoded and the Hebrew characters won't be replaced, but then the web UI and other things like the digest boiler plate and TOC will be in Hebrew.

      Questions - if we make above change, other digest users in this list will see Hebrew, right? The list owners must not agree to this change. Also, do you think we should change the setting the " When receiving digests, which format is default?" from "Plain" to "MIME".

3)      You can set Mailman's character set for English to utf-8 by putting

      add_language('en', 'English (USA)', 'utf-8')

      in mm_cfg.py (and restarting Mailman). The downside of this is the bodies of Mailman generated messages including plain digests will be
      base64 encoded and will not be readable by non-MIME aware MUAs. This is not much of an issue these days as such MUAs are rare.

      If the settings in above member option page can fix this customer's problem, we will be cautious to make the change to impact our mailing lists.

Thanks,

Carl Xie

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:mark at msapiro.net]
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2015 11:22 AM
To: Xie, Wei; mailman-users at python.org
Subject: Re: Does mailman 2.1.18 support hebrew language ?

On 01/09/2015 06:30 AM, Xie, Wei wrote:
> Mark,
>
> We have a customer who reports one problem - digest is changing hebrew language to question marks. We just want to know whether mailman 2.1.18 support hebrew language. If support, how to set up?


Mailman has supported Hebrew since 2.1.10. That is not your issue. Your issue is that users are posting Hebrew to a list whose preferred_language is English and Mailman's character set for English is ASCII. The plain text digest is encoded in the character set of the list's preferred language, thus the non-ascii characters are replaced.

You have a number of choices:

1) If users subscribe to the MIME format digest, each message will be in a separate message/rfc822 MIME part and will retain its original encoding.

2) If you set the list's preferred_language to Hebrew on the list admin Language options page, the plain text digest will be utf-8 encoded and the Hebrew characters won't be replaced, but then the web UI and other things like the digest boiler plate and TOC will be in Hebrew.

3) You can set Mailman's character set for English to utf-8 by putting

add_language('en', 'English (USA)', 'utf-8')

in mm_cfg.py (and restarting Mailman). The downside of this is the bodies of Mailman generated messages including plain digests will be
base64 encoded and will not be readable by non-MIME aware MUAs. This is not much of an issue these days as such MUAs are rare.

--
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net<mailto:mark at msapiro.net>>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan