Quoth Tzafrir Cohen on Sun, Aug 31, 2003: > On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 01:34:35AM -0400, Vadim Vygonets wrote: > > Except some of us use tty-based mailers (for various reasons), > > and UNIX does not support Unicode natively yet. And support for > > Hebrew in UNIX is much less advanced than support for Russian and > > Japanese, for example. > > Actually, if the system's iconv doen't work well you can install gnu's > libiconv and have a decent charset and uniicode support.
The problem is that most things in UNIX assume one-byte characters, and applications may behave unexpectedly when given multibyte text (Unicode, far east languages, etc.). Case in point: you need a special terminal emulator (kterm), special editor (jvi) and pager (jless) to work with Japanese text (and I'm not even talking about input methods for the multitude of characters that the language has yet). I18n in UNIX is quite weak in general: try convince tty-based apps to display Polish and Russian (for extra points, make them display the two languages simultaneously). Right-to-left languages are even more problematic than that. This all means that if your mailer is tty-based, you need to decide which languages (encodings, to be exact) to use *before* you run it. Which sucks, frankly. > > In light of this, please explain why Emacs-bidi was developed in > > Japan, and not (e.g.) Israel or an Arabic country that actually > > *uses* right-to-left text. > > [ Just to remind to the gnus/vm users here: you might want to try it ] I use mutt/nvi, anyway ;) Vadik. -- All things considered, insanity may be the only reasonable alternative. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
