Charactersets and encoding: switching from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 3/16/06, Erik Norgaard <norgaard at locolomo.org> wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I have just installed a virgin system, FBSD 6.1-BETA3 and upgraded to
> the head of RELENG_6. Since it is virgin, I thought this may be the time
> to make the switch to UTF-8.
>
> Googling, it appears that UTF-8 was introduced in the base in 2004, but
>    I find no keymaps for UTF-8 console, no fonts, no console definition
> in /etc/termcap.
>
> Is FreeBSD ready for UTF-8?
>
> Secondly, if I successfully switch, how do I best convert files to
> UTF-8? One think is text files, I assume this should be simple, but then
> there are all the other files such as music and images with text embedded.
>
> I have understood that UTF-8 is compatible with ASCII but not with the
> ISO character sets used in Europe.
>
> Thanks, Erik
>
> --
> Ph: +34.666334818                                  web: www.locolomo.org
> S/MIME Certificate: www.daemonsecurity.com/ca/8D03551FFCE04F06.crt
> Subject ID:  9E:AA:18:E6:94:7A:91:44:0A:E4:DD:87:73:7F:4E:82:E7:08:9C:72
> Fingerprint: 5B:D5:1E:3E:47:E7:EC:1C:4C:C8:3A:19:CC:AE:14:F5:DF:18:0F:B9
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>

I wonder if you should google more on UTF-8 and its
support in operating systems.

For one thing, you won't get a unicode console, not on
your traditional x86 hardware.

It's easy to get UTF-8 support in X, though. Just set LANG,
LC_ALL and some other variables (the more the better) to
en_US.UTF-8 or whatever unicode locale you want. You'll
have to recompile some ports with UTF8 support. Check
their makefiles for that.

Good luck!