On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:22:47 +0000 Ken Moffat <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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 Tks for the info I'll take your advice and make my system utf8 tks -- Randy Dach Having fun as usual _______________________________________________ Clfs-support mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cross-lfs.org/listinfo.cgi/clfs-support-cross-lfs.org
