> > seer26 wrote on 2002-11-24 17:26 UTC: > > > > > >o Red Hat Linux now installs using UTF-8 (Unicode) locales by default in > > > languages other than Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. > > > > Any information about why CJK isnt UTF-8 by default?
I was disappointed that they had decided against using UTF-8 for CJK locales. So, I filed a bug and hopefully next RedHat will use UTF-8 for all locales. See <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=75829> for more details. > >I'd suspect the usual reasons discussed here many times before: > > - narrow/wide glyph width practice with UTF-8 under xterm differs from > traditional CJK width system Well, this was resolved in recent xterm. I submitted a patch to add an option 'cjk_width' and it's put in several months ago. > - CJK users have already had multi-byte encodings with which they are > happy, therefore they have far less pressure to move away from the > traditional schemes than users of European, African, etc. > languages with their traditional single-byte charset mess. What you wrote may be true of Japanese some of whom don't like Unicode in general. However, at leasat 'being happy' part is far from true for Koreans. Koreans were never happy with EUC-KR and other multibyte encodings devised for Korean because none of them is good enough for the full support of Korean. U+1100 Hangul Conjoining Jamo block is by far the best way to represent Korean fully(it'd have been even better had they just encoded basic Jamos - 17L's, 11V's and 17T's cutting out all unnecessary cluster-Jamos) and we've been moving very rapidly on this front recently (Mozilla and Pango will be able to render all possible combinations of Jamos - alphabets - found in existing text when my patch go in. Besides, we have a full-fledged input module for gtk that exclusively works in terms of U+1100 Hangul Jamos.) Whether they actually made a move to UTF-8 or not (say, when making their web pages, writing emails, and so forth), virtually no one in Korea disputes that we need to move on to UTF-8 asap. Jungshik -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
