Time for me to make another attempt at following this up. On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 09:29:07AM -0700, Jim Gifford wrote: > Ken Moffat wrote: > > OK, my initial findings from using ncursesw in the console with a > >locale of en_GB.UTF-8 are that I can see zero benefit. In > >particular, common West-European accented characters (e.g. the > >o-umlaut in my .sig) display as multiple characters. This is no > >different from how they display with the book's non-wide ncurses. > > > > On xterms on systems with the non-wide ncurses, many of these > >characters do display correctly, and I can even generate some of > >them from the keyboard. [...] > > From the testing I've done, I agree, but if things were more programs > were compliant with utf-8 then it would benefit us as a project, but > right now I don't see any benefit. I want to try again once the new > groff and man come out and see if we can work on that at that point.
Actually, I've found a benefit with ncursesw - my mail is all on my server, and I access it from my desktop using ssh with mutt. After I copyed some mailboxes to a desktop where I'd built the system with ncursesw, and compiled mutt on that system, the ability to read things correctly in an xterm was much enhanced. Things like 'smart quotes', german 'ssharp', and an s-cedilla in a name in From: all showed correctly. So, I'm rebuilding my server with ncursesw. Moving to UTF-8 isn't a no-brainer for people with existing mail in other formats, my experiments suggest glibc iconv couldn't usefully convert email (the messages where conversion of an mbox out bailed out at an invalid character seemed to be pure ascii!) so old mail is going to start displaying some of the glyphs as e.g. \253 in UTF-8 if people do that. But then, any old mail already in UTF-8 should become ok. Groff and man are really a separate issue. Certainly, our current groff can't handle UTF-8. But then, most languages don't have *any* manpages. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce _______________________________________________ Clfs-support mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cross-lfs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/clfs-support
