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Re: Status of UTF-8 Debian changelogs



On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 09:31:26PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 04:21:33PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > What do you lose here? Those who have fonts that can display the
> > character in question will be able to do so; those who don't won't, but
> > will see some reasonably obvious indicator like a "?" or a filled-in
> > square to show that the character is one they can't display. This is
> > superior to the situation where those who don't have such fonts just see
> > some gibberish.

> Superior? No way, it's just as bad. Whether the noise is gibberish, or
> whether it consist of question marks or cute little squares doesn't make
> any difference at all.

Except that UTF8 is non-destructive when interpreted as any other
character set.  The same cannot be said of many other character sets:
trying to display some Western charsets on some CJK terminals can cause
codepage shifts that corrupt the display of the remainder of the text,
IIRC.

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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