Karl Eichwalder
Mike FABIAN
writes: (X)Emacs work OK for some subsets of UTF-8, i.e. they work good enough for the stuff I normally need (German and Japanese in UTF-8).
Yes, but with Emacs it is easily possible to break UTF-8 files using cut-and-paste under X. Emacs 21.3 and Emacs from CVS are quite good concerning UTF-8 (but I don't use CJK langauges, though).
We have bug reports concerning cut and paste problems for (X)Emacs in de_DE@euro as well. Overall I think that (X)Emacs work at least as good in de_DE.UTF-8 as they work in de_DE@euro already.
xfig has problems in UTF-8 locales, but that is no valid reason not to use UTF-8 by default, in my opinion it is much better to start such legacy applications which do not yet have proper UTF-8 support explicitely in a legacy locale like
LC_ALL=ja_JP.eucJP xfig
until they are fixed.
Yes. This is what I do. But as long as those issues are not solved, we must not switch to UTF-8 by default.
If we wait until all old applications are fixed for UTF-8 we will
never be able to switch.
And the benefits of switching are far greater than the disadvantages.
Starting such an old application like xfig with a wrapper script
is a minor inconvenience. And there are not many of such applications
left which are still commonly used anyway.
Not using UTF-8 when trying to use several non-English languages is a
terrible mess.
--
Mike Fabian