Karl Eichwalder
Marc Waeckerlin
writes: As long as the system does not support UTF-8 per default, the system is not sound.
Some programs are still not ready for UTF-8 (e.g., Emacs, xfig, and man).
(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).
'man' also works reasonably well. man-pages for languages where the
legacy encoding was ISO-8859-1 (German, French, ...) are already
handled correctly by default in the respective UTF-8 locales
(de_DE.UTF-8, fr_FR.UTF-8, ...). For other languages like Czech
(legacy encoding ISO-8859-2) and Japanese (legacy encoding EUC-JP), I
have workarounds in the SuSE groff package since SuSE 8.1
already. These are only (ugly) workarounds, but they are effective and
I didn't notice any problems when displaying Japanese man pages for a
long time already.
If you find any problems, please report them.
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.
--
Mike Fabian