On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:44:02 -0700, Mark Wedel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What would be good to help out on this is basic directions in the editor as > needed to embed the UTF8 characters. Same for some of the more popular > editors > so users now how to enter them.
Nowadays, most Linux systems are configured to use UTF-8 by default so most users will not have to change anything from their setup. This is usually done by setting the environment variable LANG to "en_US.UTF-8" (or something else than en_US depending on your language). This can also be done with the LC_* variables such as LC_CTYPE. A few systems are still configured with the old "C" locale or "en_US" without UTF-8 but most distros now default to "en_US.UTF-8". Use the command "locale" to check how your system is configured. If the locale is configured correctly, then most editors will save the right UTF-8 byte sequences to the file after the user has entered or copied some non-ASCII characters. We should probably write something similar to this section of the GIMP developers FAQ: http://developer.gimp.org/faq.html#id2467550 The examples given in that FAQ explain how to configure emacs or vi for: - setting the default code indentation style to the "GNU style" (a different style is used for crossfire and it doesn't match any of the predefined ones, so that would need some tweaking). - setting the default coding system to UTF-8 - setting the name and e-mail address used when a ChangeLog entry is added automatically (with M-X add-change-log-entry in emacs or with the function NewChangelogEntry in vim) > And lastly, we probably need to update the documentation that UTF8 is the > proper codes to use, and the maps updated. For documentation, those hints on > how to enter those characters would be useful. Right. UTF-8 will be mostly useful for those like me who want to use accented characters to write their name correcly. It is likely that those users have a keyboard with keys for entering these accented characters directly, or they know other ways to enter them anyway. Others who want to write a few accented characters can copy them from the character map (Linux or Windows) or from a character picker applet (Linux). I think that the usage of UTF-8 in the source code and in the maps should be limited to the accented characters that we really need. Even if UTF-8 supports it, I don't think that we should start entering strings in runic alphabet, hieroglyphs or linear-B because it is likely that most users will not have the right fonts to display these strange characters. So let's keep it simple. Besides, if we want to write strange text in maps, we already have the media tag [strange] for that. -Raphaël _______________________________________________ crossfire mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
