[H-GEN] UTF-8 vs ISO-8859-1

Troy Piggins troy at piggo.com
Thu Jun 22 03:21:09 EDT 2006


* Ted Percival <ted at midg3t.net> :
> 
> Troy Piggins wrote:
> > On most linux distros I've installed, if I enter my location as
> > Brisbane, Australia during the install process it automatically
> > seems to set locale to UTF-8.
> > 
> > $ locale
> > LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
> <snip>
> > 
> > I am not sure of /all/ of the implications of this, I think most of
> > the applications I use from the terminal (mutt, slrn, elinks, 
> > midnight-commander etc) all seemed to display characters like
> > umlats (?spelling) correctly/better if locale was ISO-8859-1.
> > 
> > Is this correct?  Or was it a TERM type setting issue?
> > 
> > What /should/ I be using?
> 
> I recommend UTF-8 because it allows you to display a much greater range
> of characters. Most programs these days support UTF-8 and often use it
> as a default.

Thanks for the advice.

> As for better display in terminals, installing the 'console-data' Debian
> package adds fonts that display UTF-8 reasonably. They seem to be
> missing a lot of non-latin characters, but at least missing characters
> are shown as a single box rather than 2-4 "junk" characters, throwing
> everything out of alignment.

Already had that package installed.  What you describe is what I see
- the box character where I know other characters should be.  The
missing characters *were* displayed in my previous "Breezy 5.04"
Ubuntu distro, but not in the new "Dapper 6.06" version :-(

> I've heard a rumour that xterm still doesn't support UTF-8. The
> console-data package will most likely only help if you're using a tty,
> though Gnome's Terminal definitely supports UTF-8 properly, and I'd bet
> on Konsole also working.

Most of my usage is through PuTTY over ssh, and screen sessions
within putty.  But that has always been the case.

> I'd guess Ubuntu's package is probably also called console-data, not
> sure about other distros.

See above.  Thanks for the advice though.

-- 
Troy Piggins
  ,-o   Ubuntu v6.06 (Dapper Drake): kernel 2.6.15-25-server, 
 o   )  postfix 2.2.10, procmail 3.22, mutt 1.5.11i,
  `-o   slrn 0.9.8.1/rt (score_color patch), vim 7.0




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