[Clfs-support] Fw: [elug] utf-8 vs iso8859

[Randolph D Dach]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:22:47 +0000
Ken Moffat <zarniwhoop at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 08:34:45PM -0700, Randolph D Dach wrote:
> > 
> > I'm trying to set up the locale for  this computer and was wondering 
> > 
> > should 
> > LC_ALL=en_CA , en_CA.utf8, or en_CA.iso88591
> > 
> > I've looked at the net for arguments for or against the above options but none of it makes much sense.  Does anyone out there know where I can find definitive information on the advantages/disadvantages to setting the locale to any of the above locales
> > 
> > Tks
> > -- 
> > Randy Dach
> > Having fun as usual
> 
>  I've been using UTF-8 for a few years now.
> 
>  UTF-8 supports pretty-much every language (with current software
> many african languages are in-practice poorly supported because
> combining-accents don't usually work).  In an xterm or any graphical
> application, you should be able to display glyphs from all languages
> together.  In the console, support is slightly more restricted - a
> maximum of 512 different glyphs in a screen font, so Japanese and
> Chinese cannot be shown on a regular console.
> 
>  The legacy encodings support far fewer characters, and the various
> latin/8859 encodings differ in their interpretation of what
> character a particular value represents, so it is not possible to
> mix e.g. hungarian (double acute accents on o and u : ő ű) or polish
> (slash on l : ł, tail (ogonek) on e.g. e : ę ) with western european
> variations (such as the tilde on e.g. n : ñ, or the scandinavian
> letters such as ae : æ ).
> 
>  If you use gnome, UTF-8 has been preferred for several years.
> 
>  The major disadvantage of UTF-8 is that some people will persist in
> using legacy encodings.  For me, that is not a significant problem -
> I anyway get mail from windows users with strange \244 or whatever
> characters (probably 'smart quotes' in some windows-specific
> codepage).
> 
>  For text, UTF-8 files are of course a little larger but in an age
> when most documents use xml the overhead of UTF-8 is not usually
> significant.
> 
>  The other problem with UTF-8 is that if you have a glyph which you
> can't render for lack of a suitable font, it takes a lot longer to
> decode the multibyte character by-hand to work out what it's value
> is in the conventional U+nnnn format.
> 
> ĸen (in this case, the first letter is the obsolete greenlandic kra,
> which for all intents and purposes is similar to cyrillic or greek
> lowercase k).
> -- 
> das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce
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Tks for the info

I'll take your advice and make my system utf8 

tks
-- 
Randy Dach
Having fun as usual