On Thu, 26 Jul 2001, Ionel Mugurel Ciob�c� wrote: > > > I sent an e-mail to the Romanian Translation of Free Software > > > about UTF-8 and the answer was short. You guess it. > > > > What do they use then? > > If utf-8 is not usable for you, then iso-8859-16 is *even less* usable! > > They use ascii, 7bit only. They are apparently unfamiliar with the state of the art. GNU gettext (the library that is used to handle multi-lingual messages in GNU projects) is today perfectly able to handle message catalogues in UTF-8 and then translate or transliterate them correctly into ASCII, ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-16, or whatever else the user's locale uses. Ulrich drepper and Bruno Haible have put a lot of work into getting this right and people really should use it now. Even if people use ASCII terminal emulators, the Romanian message catalogues should most definitely be in UTF-8 today, because the correct characters will be displayed even in ASCII. Please tell them to make themselves familiar with a recent version of GNU gettext before wasting their time with producing Romanian ASCII message catalogues. 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/
