On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 peter_constable@sil.org wrote:
>Can anybody give me a brief summary of the current state of
>affairs for Linux with regard to currently available levels of
>support for Unicode and for i18n in general, as well as of what
>work is currently being done to improve support?
Most things are currently waiting for the imminent release of glibc2.2,
which should implement all the ISO C and POSIX widecharacter and multibyte
character functions. This will provide the the base to convert all
the GNU utilities.
Some work is being done independently of this :
* more terminal emulators are supporting utf-8. xterm, gnome-terminal
do this, and I believe support is planned for KDE's "konsole". The
console and tty driver's utf-8 support will be improved.
* some apps are being converted. there are patches against pine and tin
to add limited utf-8 support, probably more apps of this type (that
deal with MIME messages and thus have to deal with characterset conversion
anyway), will be converted in the near future.
* a family of fixed width iso10646-1 fonts for X11 have been prepared.
These will be in XFree86 4.0.
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html>
* Unicode support for GTK+1.4 is planned by the maintainer.
<http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/gscript/>. Depending on when this
is ready, GNOME may move to this...
* QT2 has Unicode support, thus KDE2 will.
* editors :
xemacs already supports utf-8 in a limited fashion with an add-on.
emacs is going to move to utf-8 internally in the medium to long-term.
vim will probably have support for utf-8.
utf-8 support for pico I shall start on soon.
* other programs :
miscellaneous other programs have utf-8 support. lynx, for example,
(although it is slightly broken with ncurses lynx).
Some good URLs are
Markus Kuhn's "UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux"
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
Bruno Haible's "Unicode HOWTO"
ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/utf8/Unicode-HOWTO.html
which contains links to many already existing patches.
We have a mailing list "linux-utf8", which you can subscribe to by sending
mail to majordomo@nl.linux.org with the line "subscribe linux-utf8" in the
body. The archive is at <http://www.linux.eu.org/lists/linux-utf8/>.
Recently a website at <http://www.li18nux.org/> seems to have sprung into
being, claiming to be the "Linux Internationalisation Initiative". Who
these people are, and if they plan to actually contribute code, is
unknown to me.
-- Robert
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