It is about time to remove a couple of obsolete habits from user
documentation:
- Do NOT define the environment variable LESSCHARSET. The current
version of less is able to test the locale and determines automatically
whether you want Latin-1 or UTF-8. Defining LESSCHARSET is a habit from
the time where less would by default assume everything is in ASCII,
which it does not any more. Defining LESSCHARSET deactivates the
automatic locale-based selection of the character encoding.
- Do NOT use the option -u8 in xterm. This option was a temporary hack
from the time before we had UTF-8 locales supported by glibc. It is
now possible to set LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 (or whatever) without causing
every application that calls setlocale(LC_ALL, "") to spit out an
error message. Setting the locale to one that uses UTF-8 and then
starting xterm without option -u8 is the correct way of starting a
UTF-8 xterm. The will ensure that applications find inside a UTF-8
xterm always also a UTF-8 locale.
With the next version of xterm, it will also not be necessary any more
to specify an iso10646-1 font when you use UTF-8 mode. There will be
separate font resources such that you can specify fonts for both the
8-bit and the 16-bit mode in your ~/.Xdefaults file
- Do NOT use groff -Tlatin1 anywhere (e.g., in /etc/man.config). Instead
use nroff, which is now a shell script that tests the locale (using
"locale charmap" and then calls groff with the suitable -T option.
This will cause nroff and man to work automatically correctly in both
UTF-8 and Latin-1 locales.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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