Subj : Re: charset question for Immortal Barons
To   : Andy Alt
From : Digital Man
Date : Thu Jul 09 2026 13:29:36

  Re: Re: charset question for Immortal Barons
  By: Andy Alt to Digital Man on Thu Jul 09 2026 07:30 am

 > Subject: Re: charset question for Immortal Barons
 >
 > -=> Digital Man wrote to Andy Alt <=-
 >
 >  DM> Traditional BBS terminals (including even modern ones like SyncTERM,
 >  DM> Netrunner, etc.) do not (yet) support UTF-8 - just CP437. And
 >  DM> Synchronet assumes all doors, by default, output CP437. So you need to
 >  DM> convert your output character set to CP437. It's not a "design" so much
 >  DM> as an implementation detail. --
 >  DM>                                             digital man (rob)
 >
 > Thanks! That pretty much confirms things. Regarding sbbs, has there ever
 > been a
 > discussion about configuring a door to use the charset the user has enabled
 > (or
 > what's been auto-detected) in their settings?

Most recent builds of SCFG (v3.22a) allow the sysop to enable "Untranslated" for any external program (door) I/O mode, in which case, it's entirely up to the door itself to do any charset/encoding conversions (e.g. CP437->PETSCII, UTF8->CP437).

But other than some recent experiments I've been working on, I know of no doors that actually handle the charset conversions themselves.

 > On a loosely related topic, I've been working on modemu2k, and for testing,
 > I use it with minicom. On Vertrauen (and other boards), cp437 is
 > auto-detected, but I get odd characters (mostly '?'s) at some of the ANSI
 > screens. When I tried minicom's '-R CP437' option, the characters were
 > correct, but some of the
 >
 > block chars weren't positioned properly (at the main menu, for example), and
 > the prompt appeared in the lower-right corner of the menu, buried in the
 > border. Other sbbs boards I've tried recently have an option where I can
 > manually change to UTF-8, and that always gives me the correct output when
 > using minicom. On Vert, I've changed to US-ASCII (I didn't see a utf-8
 > option).

UTF-8 must be auto-detected on Synchronet (upon connect). There's no mechanism to manually-force UTF-8.

 > I've used syncterm (telnet/ssh client) a little and so far never have to
 > change
 >
 > any settings on vert or in syncterm for proper operation.

Sounds right.
-- 
                                            digital man (rob)

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