locale/unicode problem
locale/unicode problem
- Subject: locale/unicode problem
- From: Max Barel <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 21:01:27 +0100
There is definitely a locale problem between X11.app and OS X.
All Cocoa applications are able to use unicode (UTF-8). Even if some of
them default to use other encoding inside documents, for example
TextEdit use MacRoman in text documents, they are designed to deal with
unicode.
Most important files names are in UTF-8 encoding.
Problem arise with Unix application and specifically with X11. All
latin system locales as well as X11 locales (in X11.app at least) are
linked with iso-8859. The fr and fr_FR, for example are fr_FR.ISO8859-1.
I don't know which locale the system claims to use, but whichever it
is, standard libraries come to use iso8859. Beside a few application,
like "xterm -u8", which are able to be run with UTF-8 capability, all
other are unable to read OS X files names correctly.
I tried to change the aliasing of fr locale to UTF-8 counterpart.
Abiword see the change an display UTF-8 menu strings with an iso-8859
font ! Gimp and OpenOffice don't bother.
Moreover some of the most useful apps (gimp, Abiword) use gtk libraries.
I tried to use an iso10646 font as default font in my .gtkrc. Both
displayed "square" unreadable characters.
I have read posts in X11.app forum about a Xfree lib bug : "locale not
supported by C library". I'm not sure if it related to this problem
since these post were for japanese language, but there were reference
to a patch in Xfree lib.
My conclusion, and request for comments :
-X11.app and Xfree must clean up configuration files and libraries to
be able to deal with locale in unicode charset.
-Application targeted for OS X and specifically OpenOffice should, in
their own code, use UTF-8 file names. The locale is not the point
there, since it seem that unicode is used for any locale in OS X.
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