On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 07:37:51AM -0700, Xeno Campanoli wrote: > I've wondered about that. Why aren't "modern" systems just moving > straight to Unicode?
Well, as I said, they are. It's mostly the modern PEOPLE who are not... ;-) Debian Sarge is pretty good as far as UTF-8 support, though for people who want to use multiple languages (more than one of which are non-latin languages) input support is still sub-optimal, hard to get working, and extremely poorly documented (as far as I can tell). I also use Fedora Core 4 on most of my personal systems, and I find that to be a little better than Sarge (it's a bit more current). I'm sure the less stable distributions of Debian have the same level of support as Fedora, but for various reasons I won't go into here, I don't use those. While the majority of people in the Windows world have switched to XP by now, there are still a surprisingly large number of people using Windows 98/ME (or even older releases) which don't support Unicode. The same is true in the Unix world... or at least the people using those systems haven't gotten around to updating their environments to use the Unicode support their OS provides. So, it's a complicated issue. Maybe 10 years from now, everyone will finally be using Unicode... but by then we'll probably have some other standard too. ;-) -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
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