>From http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/8.0/en/os/i386/RELEASE-NOTES :
o Red Hat Linux now installs using UTF-8 (Unicode) locales by default in
languages other than Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.
This has been known to cause various issues:
. Line drawing characters in applications such as make menuconfig do
not always appear correctly in certain locales.
. On the console, the latarcyrheb-sun16 font is used for best Unicode
coverage. Due to the use of this font, bold colors are not available.
. Certain third party applications, such as the Adobe(R) Acrobat
Reader(R), may not function correctly (or crash upon startup) because
they lack support for Unicode locales. Until third party developers
provide such support in their products, you may work around this issue
by setting the LANG environment variable at the shell prompt to C
prior to typing the application name. For example:
env LANG=C acroread
It is very exciting to see that the first major Linux distribution now
uses UTF-8 locales by default. This will surely speed up significantly
the remaining UTF-8 problems in various apps being fixed!
Does anyone know details about what causes the first issue (line drawing
characters)? I had though, the current version of xterm still does
support ISO 2022 in UTF-8 mode for such applications, though I do
believe strongly that the applications in question out to be fixed and
the hack removed, as that was not how UTF-8 was meant to be used.
I did report the third issue (acroread breaking in UTF-8 locales) to
Adobe multiple times, but no reaction yet. I suspect it might be an
issue with the widget library they use and acroread ought in my opinion
to ignore the locale entirely as it has no locale-dependnet
functionality anyway.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
