On 8/29/06, Jonathon McKitrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I've entered the world of unicode with my mac, and I'd like to make things consistent across my machines.
Are you interested in utf-8 for filesystem encoding as well? This is where utf-8 becomes painful. It turns out that there are several normalization forms for it, where Windows uses NFC, and and MacOS uses NFD. The difference being that identical characters can be stored in different ways. For example, for a character with an umlaut, the umlaut can optionally be external. See http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/index.html for more information. Now, the mac expects NFD, and the Finder is completely incapable of dealing with NFC. Trying to move those files around over NFS can result in them simply dissappearing! Likewise, NFD encoded files visible over SMB on a Windows machine are not displayed properly. Unfortunately, the only portable option is to use SMB exclusively to export NFC encoded files from a unix box. In this case, the SMB client on the mac handles the renormalization. If you use NFS exclusively with a mac, note that some non-native applications like Azureus will still write NFC encoded filenames which must me converted manually. If you have lots of files to translate, there is a convenient tool available in pkgsrc: converters/convmv. It allows you to recursively renormalize or transcode a set of files from/to anything supported by iconv. It needs to be used over a fs which does not mangle characters though, so something like NFS or a local filesystem. Chris