Pine and Alternate Character Sets

Pine attempts to stay out of the way so that it won't prevent you from viewing mail in any character set. It will simply send the message to your display device. If the device is capable of displaying the message as it was written it will do so. If not, the display may be partially or totally incorrect. If the message is marked as being in a character set other than "US-ASCII" and it is a character set that is different from the set you have indicated with the "character-set" variable in your Pine configuration, a warning message will be printed to your screen at the beginning of the message display.

In all cases Pine requires that the display device can handle the character set. For example, most X-terminals will display the ISO-8859-1 character set if the right font is selected. VT220's and higher also display ISO-8859-1. Displays for other characters sets are less common.