Kaixo! On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 03:53:11PM -0500, Edward H. Trager wrote:
> > Well, that is not so. for many languages it is better to run something > > else than UTF-8. > > Which languages, specifically, and why is it "better" for said languages? "better" means that some programs behaving nicely in 8bit encoding do less nicely in utf-8. However, on the other hand, there are much new things possible that weren't possible with 8bit encoding, so it is not an absolute "better", but a balanced thing, and depending on your preferences and needs the appreciation will change. The number of offending programs is constantly shrinking also (either they get fixed, or they become irrelevant as another program provides the same functionality and supports utf-8). Note also that a lot of programs (particularly text mode ones) have wrong/incomplete utf-8 support; however, when considering only the subset of unicode covering the various old 8bit encodings that subset is perfectly supported. So, there are still various languages for which the current level of utf-8 support is not good enough, but those are not well supported, or even not supported at all, with non-utf-8 encodings anyway; and for those that are *well* supported in non-utf-8 encodings, they are generally as well supported in utf-8 (with some very few, and shrinking, exceptions), plus they have more possibilities that were not possible before (for example, you cannot use the euro sign in Polish with iso-8859-2, you must use utf-8; you cannot write typographical English (with nice quotes, N-dash, M-dash and such things) in iso-8859-1, etc). The adoption of utf-8 is also fastening the solution of the still remaining problems. > Either way, the Linux distributions should run > the localedef scripts to set up UTF-8 locales To be LI18NUX2000 compliant it is even mandatory to have an UTF-8 version of each locale installed (with the sole exception of "C", which is not exactly an "installed" locale either). -- Ki �a vos v�ye b�n, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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