Radovan Garabik wrote on 2002-11-27 07:41 UTC:
> > Was the lack of support for UTF-8 locales in some popular email clients
> > the biggest obstacle?
>
> No. I do not even remebmer email clients being mentioned.
> The main complaints were: "Czech/Slovak keyboard stopped
> working at the console", "I managed somehow to make
> Czech/Slovak console keyboard to work, but dead keys are not
> working", "I cannot see diacritics in my text documents which
> were fine under RH7.2", "Printing from application XXX
> messes up diacritics", "Application YYY worked fine with
> diacritics in RH7.2 and does not work now" etc...
> Mostly these were clueless users, I suspect those less
> clueless knew what is the matter and switched the locale
> by themselves.
Some of these are trivial to fix with a minor amount of user awareness
(e.g. "I cannot see diacritics in my text documents which were fine
under RH7.2" -> iconv). Others are a good reason to properly investigate
the problem and patch it.
I think it is now a very good time to get in touch with the authors of
the various national language HOWTO's and help them to revise their
texts to explain that both UTF-8 and whatever charset they documented
previously are both in principle suitable encodings for this language,
how to convert between the two, and what the practical issues with using
UTF-8 are.
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to
conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in
the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has
for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions,
and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.
-- Machiavelli, "The Prince"
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/
