Dear all,
The Unix/Linux/*BSD people among you might be interested in joining the
linux-utf8(_at_)nl(_dot_)linux(_dot_)org
mailing list, which is the greatest nest of people working towards
solving character encoding headaches by moving towards UTF-8 as the
primary encoding for all text files, filenames, environment variables,
etc. under POSIX systems (similar to what Plan9 has achieved already
back in 1992).
So subscribe, send the line
subscribe linux-utf8
in the body of a message to
majordomo(_at_)nl(_dot_)linux(_dot_)org
Also have a look at the list archive on
http://www.linux.eu.org/lists/linux-utf8/
To get started with using UTF-8 on the free POSIX systems, install the
following software:
- First read
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
- Get the latest xterm version (preferably patch version #119 or
newer) with UTF-8 support:
http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey/xterm/xterm.html
Compile it with "./configure --enable-wide-chars ; make" and use
command line option -u8 when you invoke xterm to switch input and
output to UTF-8. Use an *-ISO10646-1 font when you are in UTF-8 mode.
- Get the new ISO10646-1 versions of the standard -misc-fixed-*
xterm fonts:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz
- Get the latest version of "less" with UTF-8 support:
http://www.flash.net/~marknu/less/less-344.tar.gz
(use "export LESSCHARSET=utf-8" to tell less your encoding)
Especially have a look with "xterm -u8" at the many UTF-8 files in the
examples/ directory of the above X font package!
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
