Re: Problem with iso8859 on xterm/with man(1)
joost witteveen <joostje@komputilo.org>:
> > > Also, why isn't latin1 or UTF-8 default after installation?
> > A.) Debian is a multilingual distribution. Why not latin2 or Japanese
> > encodings?
>
> OK, but then still: why not UTF-8? That's not Western-European biased,
> is it?
Maybe quite soon we can have UTF-8 as the default, but at present some
programs don't work properly in UTF-8, so it's not a safe default.
> However, that's still not quite OK, as mutt now still doesn't
> show mime messages that with ISO-8859-1 coding correctly:(.
It should do. Mutt works very well in a UTF-8 xterm for me.
> > btw, in debian-l10n-spanish we are discussing a move to ISO-8859-15
> > (how if not are we going to input and display the Euro?). Is it being
> > considered by other national groups?
>
> What's wrong with UTF-8? (I just don't know anything about this all,
> but hear that UTF-8 is `the best').
UTF-8 is definitely the best, because it allows all characters to be
represented in the same coded character set, however, many programs
have hardwired assumptions about 1 byte = 1 character = 1 screen cell
so those programs won't work properly in UTF-8.
Edmund
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