Hallo Richard!

 RM> What difference does it make?
 RM> Most people (I assume >> 90% percent will NOT be able to see
 RM> extended characters correctly

If by extended you mean multibyte then by the accounts I have read lately the
majority of users can read them but I believe that has nothing to do with
fidonet editors.  From my observations even the old DOS editors that cannot
properly display them can replicate them perfectly.  So far only the 8-bit
fidonet editors, such as golded+ and msged, that have issues replicating
multibyte characters and in fact totally screw them up.  So even abandonware
DOS-think is superior to those products which is a very sad testiment to all
things FTN compliant methinks.

As for what difference it makes, my guesstimation is probably no difference but
I still think it is/was worth the effort.  We'll see I am sure.

 RM> But it WILL make a difference for Jamnntpd or Hotdoged, that DO
 RM> support UTF-8.

There you go.  However I am doubtful about the CHRS kludge being required for
either of them to recognize UTF-8 characters.

 RM> No new information from your test.

Don't be so sure.  I don't see you using LATIN-1 for ISO-8859-1 in this latest
reply, although 8859-1 isn't a legitimate alias either.  Oh well, one step at a
time eh?  :-)

-={ grep 8859-1// /usr/lib/gconv/gconv-modules }=-
alias ISO-IR-100//  ISO-8859-1//
alias ISO_8859-1:1987// ISO-8859-1//
alias ISO_8859-1//  ISO-8859-1//
alias ISO8859-1//  ISO-8859-1//
alias ISO88591//  ISO-8859-1//
alias LATIN1//  ISO-8859-1//
alias L1//   ISO-8859-1//
alias IBM819//  ISO-8859-1//
alias CP819//   ISO-8859-1//
alias CSISOLATIN1//  ISO-8859-1//
alias 8859_1//  ISO-8859-1//
alias OSF00010001//  ISO-8859-1//
module ISO-8859-1//  INTERNAL  ISO8859-1 1
module INTERNAL  ISO-8859-1//  ISO8859-1 1

Het leven is goed,
Maurice

... Huil niet om mij, ik heb vi.
--- GNU bash, version 4.4.23(1)-release (x86_64-bonnell-linux-gnu)