Re: [Groff] German Umlaute, ISO-8859-1, postscript.

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Sun May 16 22:58:29 2004, address@hidden wrote:
...
> If you are using a UTF-8 locale, you *are* saying that UTF-8 is the
> default encoding, and it's then perfectly reasonable to save the file
> as UTF-8 by default.
...
> IMO of course, but there are only
> two sane encodings to use today: ASCII and UTF-8.  Anything else
> should be recoded to UTF-8.
> 
> The only thing holding this back are tools (such as groff) that can't
> cope.  For those, you can recode on the fly, or leave them in the old
> encoding for the time being.

Thanks for the overview. I am vaguely aware of the problems with the
iso8859-x encodings, but I didn't realise people were actually trying hard
to do something about them ;-) And I wasn't aware that an UTF-8 locale is
supposed to affect the encoding in plain text files.

I just fear this will obsolete too many useful tools, or create a barrier
between UTF-8 people and others (people on older commercial Unixes, for
example).  ISO8859-1 is good because tools written with only ASCII in mind
tend to work (roughly) properly with it...

/Jörgen

-- 
  // Jörgen Grahn        "Even if there was a market for it, nobody would
\X/ <address@hidden>   want to associate their company name with such
                          pain and destruction."
                                   -- <address@hidden>