Re: [SM-USERS] The concept of custom charset plugin, but for other languages

[Tomas K. <to...@us...>]

> Squirrelmail 1.4.5, Courier on Fedora Core 3, in case it matters.
> My default charset is set to utf-8
>
>
> I have some users who are Japanese who have noticed that since compose
> switches the charset (to iso-2022-jp), unless the recipient (also on
> squirrelmail), is displaying in Japanese, the characters are garbled.
>
> If I send japanese from my English (custom charset), everyone can see the
> characters fine, regardless of their language setting.
>
> What I need is some way to make it so that Japanese composes in UTF-8 so
> that recipients of any charset can display the messages properly.
>
> Is it as simple as editing the i18n.php and setting the charset for
> Japanese to utf-8.  I did that on a test box and it seems to resolve the
> issue, but I am wondering what ramifications this will have on other
> aspects of squirrelmail.
>
> Any ideas?

Japanese translation is very delicate thing. Translation is designed to
use euc-jp internally and send emails in iso-2022-jp. I've warned Fedora
devels that they must be careful when switching Japanese to utf-8.

First thing that you must do, is to disable XTRA_CODE key in Japanese
language description. It removes main Japanese specific functions. Second
thing - grep through SquirrelMail source for 'ja_JP' and disable character
set specific Japanese workarounds. I think functions/i18n.php,
functions/page_header.php, functions/strings.php and some
functions/decode/ files need fixes. You need 1.4.6-rc1 and php with
mbstring support in order to create correct utf-8 email headers. And you
will need modified extra decoding library in order to read other Japanese
emails.

Which Japanese email client can't read utf-8? I know only that some
unnamed email software works only with iso-2022-jp.

-- 
Tomas