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Re: [bug-gnulib] quote characters in stds


From: Bruno Haible
Subject: Re: [bug-gnulib] quote characters in stds
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 21:58:05 +0200
User-agent: KMail/1.5

Karl Berry wrote:
> Yes, but rms has explicitly rejected (in previous email with me) the
> idea of recommending the use of UTF-8 in any context whatsoever.  Sigh.

Sigh. What you wrote there:

   If you need to use non-ASCII characters, for example to represent
   names of contributors, you should normally stick with one encoding, as
   one cannot in general mix encodings reliably.  

is a salomonic solution: to educated people it recommends Unicode, without
mentioning it explicitly.

> My personal experience is that it is true that Unicode is still
> considerably less widely usable than Latin1.  Sure, Unicode is available
> in many contexts and systems.  But the names in your message, just for
> example, came through as garbage to me.

That depends on your mailer. Is it a package in Emacs, or is it 'pine'
without Bernhard Kaindl's patches?

> No doubt I personally could
> eventually configure everything involved to display it properly, but the
> point is that it doesn't "just work".

True: there are some distributions where things don't "just work", but these
non-Unicode-enabled corners are diminishing.

Maybe you can reformulate the last two paragraphs in a way that is less
incorrect?

>     PS: The right spelling of the encodings is "Latin1" (no dash, no space)
>
> I'm glad to know that, it's easier to type than @tie{} :).  I had mostly
> seen it with a space.  Do you happen to know where the definitive
> spelling is given?

It's at the IANA: http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets

Bruno





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