On Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 07:48:43PM +0200, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
> That dictionnary violates the protocol, and as such, it will
> be displayed improperly in all clients that have encoding support.
> For example, it won't display properly on KDE, Windows or Gnome clients.  
> The bug should be reported to the author(s).

I mentioned it to the Debian maintainer, but he pointed out that it
works on Russian speaker's consoles and xterms (with dict) and in emacs,
where it wouldn't work otherwise. Also, regex and other search options
in dictd don't work with non-8bit encodigns. In his opinion at the time
(and he doesn't maintain them anymore), it's better to have them working
most of the time than not working but correct.

Note that the proctol authors also maintain dict and dictd, as well as
several dictionaries which are encoded in Latin-1. (dict-foldoc's mu
entry has Goedel with a Latin-1 umlaut, for example.) I believe that's
he's in close contact with upstream, so <http://bugs.debian.org/93607>
and <http://bugs.debian.org/147482> may explain some of the problems
with UTF-8 and dict, or at least Debian's side of them.

> Plain text "dict" is a bit special, as it doesn't do anything with the
> text, it just dumps it on stdout, so the proper display depends on the
> terminal used.

Special, in the rides the short bus way. (Hmm, that's not very
multi-cultural, is it?)  It's just broken; no client for a protocol that
specifies charset has any excuse for not giving a serious effort to
displaying that charset properly, which on the console means converting
it to the locale charset. A webbrowser that didn't do that would
certainly be considered broken.

-- 
David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
What we've got is a blue-light special on truth. It's the hottest thing 
with the youth. -- Information Society, "Peace and Love, Inc."
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/

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