Subject: display of character sets and UTF-8

From: "Adam H. Kerman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 13:10:24 -0500 (CDT)

See "UTF-8's usability" section of "Unicode Transformation Formats"
http://czyborra.com/utf/ for information on an editor for X11 called Yudit that
you may find useful. There's even a note about changing TERMCAP and using
display-filters in the .pinerc to see UTF-8.

But Bob Rasmussen's won't use it as it's absurd to modify the terminal to
correctly display characters, right?

Unicode is an attempt to embody all of the world's codes and symbols (and
musical notes!) and alphabets in one universal character set. Unicode
Transformation Format (UTF) is a coded character set, in other words, a mapping
of the symbol to a number. UTF-8 represents characters as 7,8, 16, and 20 bits,
a major improvement over an earlier attempt to represent everything as 16 bits.

One hopes that if UTF-8 actually is "the way to go" that they are correct about
the new 20-bit limit being large enough to encode absolutely everything!

In the meantime, the Europeans are still causing trouble by introducing
extensions to ASCII for more incompatible representations of "Latin", failing
to include Turkish characters in newer, so-called universal extensions, for the
usual political reasons. Apparently, WWI has not yet ended...

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: 
 http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------