On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 11:38:43AM +0000, Jamie Paul Griffin wrote: > > Setting a ISO-8859 locale will mostly work but it's not so all > > encompassing as using UTF-8 so if you can use UTF-8 it's better. > > ISO-8859 character sets are basically only the 'Roman' character sets of > > western[ish] Europe. Using UTF-8 will show almost anything, I get to > > see chinese spam in all its chinese glory sometimes! :-) > > Out of interest Chris, do you use FreeBSD? I only ask because oddly enough i > had better results using the ISO character sets than with UTF-8. I don't > fully understand why and perhaps it's a BSD issue/thing. With my OpenBSD > system i have even more trouble getting unicode characters to display > properly. > No I don't, I use Linux (Xubuntu). I only moved from ISO-8859 to UTF-8 a little while ago though, mainly because until a year or two go I did a lot of work on legacy Sun systems which, as regards characters sets etc. were back in the dark ages and for cross compatibility with them ISO-8859 made things easier.
My basic needs are really only western European character sets (I do actually read and write news and E-Mail in French as well as English and read, rarely, Polish) so ISO-8859 does most of what I want. I just found that so much software is now defaulting to UTF-8 that it was easier to go with that now that I don't have to deal with ancient Sun systems. -- Chris Green
