[Koha-translate] Re: Re: to begin with...

[acli@ada.dhs.org via news-to-mail gateway]

In article <3E1D91B5.6090308 at netscape.net>,
dbkliv <dbkliv at netscape.net> wrote:

>I'm curious what the problems are with representing French with
>Unicode (of whatever form).

I think there is no problem per se technically; in fact there
are certain advantages (e.g., certain characters not available
in the usual charset, e.g., "oe" in ISO-8859-1, are available in
Unicode). But if everyone uses ISO-8859-1 on their computers, it
would be unnecessary effort to convert everything to UTF-8 if
ISO-8859-1 would be just fine.

Also, I¢ don't know if people have UTF-8 editors. I¢ don't have
one (actually I have one: Mozilla's Composer, although I'd
prefer something more vi-like). If most people can edit UTF-8
files it may not be a problem.

So my perceived "problem" is that it is not the dominant
encoding.  If French people have actually stopped using
ISO-8859-1 and started using UTF-8, of course we should choose
UTF-8.

>The special French characters (&eacute; etc.) all fall into the
>first 256 characters of ASCII, and similarly of Unicode - at
>that low range, the two are nearly identical, aren't they?

Actually the ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 codes are very different.  Of
course, when you are using a Unicode-capable editor, you won't
know that some French characters really consist of 2 octets per
character in UTF-8.

-- 
Ambrose Li  <a.c.li at ieee.org>
http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/cmcc/  http://www.cccgt.org/

DRM is theft - We are the stakeholders