joost witteveen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > Also, why isn't latin1 or UTF-8 default after installation? > > A.) Debian is a multilingual distribution. Why not latin2 or Japanese > > encodings? > > OK, but then still: why not UTF-8? That's not Western-European biased, > is it?
Maybe quite soon we can have UTF-8 as the default, but at present some programs don't work properly in UTF-8, so it's not a safe default. > However, that's still not quite OK, as mutt now still doesn't > show mime messages that with ISO-8859-1 coding correctly:(. It should do. Mutt works very well in a UTF-8 xterm for me. > > btw, in debian-l10n-spanish we are discussing a move to ISO-8859-15 > > (how if not are we going to input and display the Euro?). Is it being > > considered by other national groups? > > What's wrong with UTF-8? (I just don't know anything about this all, > but hear that UTF-8 is `the best'). UTF-8 is definitely the best, because it allows all characters to be represented in the same coded character set, however, many programs have hardwired assumptions about 1 byte = 1 character = 1 screen cell so those programs won't work properly in UTF-8. Edmund
