On Jul 20, "Adam P. Harris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Jul 19, "Adam P. Harris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> I'd appreciate it if someone in the know about character sets and >>> typical Debian application support for the same could comment on >>> this spec and offer ways to make it better for multiple character >>> sets, if I quickly read it (I hope I did not miss any important thing) and I think there is not enough support for foreign languages: just sticking to Latin-1 will cut out many, many, people, mostly russian and asian readers.
I think there are two possible solutions: - use Unicode (probably UTF-7 encoded like the kernel does for ext2) and display it using the kernel console driver or a unicode xterm, or - simply be 8 bit clean and put in EVERY field informations about the encoding used (it could be latin-1 for west european languages, KOI-8 for russian, BIG-5 for chinese and so on) and program the user interface to convert the encoding to the one used by the console (this is not a trivial task). (I think the first solution is the best and easier to implement.) Please also remember that there is a big difference between stating that field X contains "ISO-8859-1 characters" and stating that field X contains "text ISO-8859-1 encoded". The actual content is the same, but in the text of the first example cannot be interpreted unless the user interface assumes something about the encoding (i.e. that those bytes represents glyphs accordingly to the ISO-8859-1 encoding). -- ciao, Marco -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
