On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 08:34:45PM -0700, Randolph D Dach wrote: > > I'm trying to set up the locale for this computer and was wondering > > should > LC_ALL=en_CA , en_CA.utf8, or en_CA.iso88591 > > I've looked at the net for arguments for or against the above options but > none of it makes much sense. Does anyone out there know where I can find > definitive information on the advantages/disadvantages to setting the locale > to any of the above locales > > Tks > -- > Randy Dach > Having fun as usual
I've been using UTF-8 for a few years now. UTF-8 supports pretty-much every language (with current software many african languages are in-practice poorly supported because combining-accents don't usually work). In an xterm or any graphical application, you should be able to display glyphs from all languages together. In the console, support is slightly more restricted - a maximum of 512 different glyphs in a screen font, so Japanese and Chinese cannot be shown on a regular console. The legacy encodings support far fewer characters, and the various latin/8859 encodings differ in their interpretation of what character a particular value represents, so it is not possible to mix e.g. hungarian (double acute accents on o and u : ő ű) or polish (slash on l : ł, tail (ogonek) on e.g. e : ę ) with western european variations (such as the tilde on e.g. n : ñ, or the scandinavian letters such as ae : æ ). If you use gnome, UTF-8 has been preferred for several years. The major disadvantage of UTF-8 is that some people will persist in using legacy encodings. For me, that is not a significant problem - I anyway get mail from windows users with strange \244 or whatever characters (probably 'smart quotes' in some windows-specific codepage). For text, UTF-8 files are of course a little larger but in an age when most documents use xml the overhead of UTF-8 is not usually significant. The other problem with UTF-8 is that if you have a glyph which you can't render for lack of a suitable font, it takes a lot longer to decode the multibyte character by-hand to work out what it's value is in the conventional U+nnnn format. ĸen (in this case, the first letter is the obsolete greenlandic kra, which for all intents and purposes is similar to cyrillic or greek lowercase k). -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce _______________________________________________ Clfs-support mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cross-lfs.org/listinfo.cgi/clfs-support-cross-lfs.org
