On Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 09:53:50PM -0200, Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> I don't know about your work environment, but every current decent online
> program understands Unicode. Its more common versions, in addition to a
> number of 8-bit ISO fonts (not vendor-specific fonts), are in pretty
> widespread use. The charset element of the Content-Type header is also
> well-defined and understood by all decent and remotely current and
> standard-conform browsers and email/newsreaders.
> =

> The Windows NT family of OSes understands Unicode, and so do most
> applications running on it. I'm sure most decent Linux/Unix programs
> understand it. Mainframe programs from the 60ies or 70ies or DOS WordStar
> don't... Ever since I left Win 3.1 behind I've never had problems
> exchanging texts with accented characters, or the Greek lowercase mu.
> Again, this problem -- if it is really one -- seems to be restricted to t=
he
> USA (not sure about other English-speaking countries). =

> =

> The common ISO fonts (ISO 8859) are well-defined. Even if some program
> should not have support for the specific encoding being used, it is
> possible to translate that easily into Unicode (if it's in some sort of
> generic text format like XML or HTML).

Wikpedia makes extensive use of unicode in it's entries involving
foreign languages and the like. Being a wikipedia addict I've used it on
all sorts of modernish computers in many environments while I've been
procrastinating. I can say I rarely see computers that don't display
almost everything correctly.  Some really obscure parts of unicode may
break, like oddball multi-character entities used for some Arab
languages, but for the most part everything just works.


It's a major, major change from just a few years ago. So older computers
will probably fail, but anything shipped in the past 3-4 years will
probably be just fine.

> So far my newsreader tells me that this message uses the us-ascii charset
> (default), because I haven't yet used anything beyond 7-bit ASCII. Now I'=
ll
> insert that dreaded Greek lower case mu "=B5" and the charset switched to

Datapoint: That =B5 turns up just fine in my default Linux console...

-- =

pete@petertodd.ca http://www.petertodd.ca
-- =

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