On Tue, 2003-08-19 at 12:37, Xavier Maillard wrote: > Hi, > > I had have already a discussion about this on the ding mailing-list and > there opinions was quite different. So I am asking it again here just > to get the maximum amount of informations before taking a decision. > > In fact I want(ed) to know whether it is/was safe to use Unicode > (i.e. utf-8) encoding system to communicate on Usenets and so forth for > mails ? > > It seems that 10 years after its creation, Unicode is not as used as it > should be (my opinion) and so, I am not sure many software > (communication software) are "aware" of Unicode stuff. Except bloated > piece of software such as Outlook, is there any risk I can encounter by > using utf-8 in my daily default encoding system ? > > I am pretty sure the majority of the *N*X MUA can easily handle/deal > with it but better have some more opinions on that. > > So what is the deal ? iso-soup or Unicode ? I still have the option to > switch my encoding (automatically) according to where/whom I am writing > but I'd rather not do that and uniformize a little bit to prevent ugly > configuration and accidents ;) Well, as long as you use UTF-8 I don't see there being any problem. Even if someone is using a non Unicode aware client, all of the regular ASCII characters should still show up just fine. And just about every application that I use has support for Unicode and has had it for a while. 99% of all international writing I see online is done in UTF. (I've never actually read anything in Cyrillic that wasn't written in UTF.) The only real exception is some Asian fonts as, from what I've understood, Unicode adoption has been slow and not always welcome. I have my entire system set up to use UTF whenever possible. The only problems I have are when using a plain (i.e. not xterm) console, some characters don't display correctly. But for communication with others, I've never had a problem. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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