[MPlayer-DOCS] [RFC] converting documentation to UTF-8

[Andrew Savchenko]

Hi!

On 29 Октябрь 2006 11:54 Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 03:40:42AM +0300, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> > There are possible several problems with russian translation:
> > not all systems support utf-8 well, there are troubles with
> > some text editors and browsers.
>
> Same to you: can you be more specific where the problems are?

Well, there are some of them. Editors wich doesn't support utf8 at 
all in my system: mcedit, vim. Links (my favourite browser) can't 
work with it also.

There are more sophisticated problems: when mounting vfat cp1251 
(e.g. usb flash device) on host with utf8 locale all non-english 
characters in filenames become completely broken and iocharset, 
and codepage mount options won't help. I don't know why for now, 
maybe something wrong in the kernel.

Also some russian man pages became broken on my system, with utf8 
locale; of course I can use english one's or convert national 
pages into utf8, but the last is some kind of headache.

> Most likely other people encountered the same problems and found
> ways to fix them.

Yes. All this problems can be fixed, I know that. But, I need to 
find/wrote somehow appropriate patches, or find helper 
applications, or spend a lot of traffic for upgrade one program, 
another and so on.

If I'll spend all weak without doing any other work, I'll assuredly 
convert my whole system to full utf8 support, including locale. 
But, why I must take deal with all this troublesome headache? Only 
for idea that utf8 is better and certainly is more proper way to 
handle encodings? Yes it is better, no doubt, utf8 is principially 
better than any other solutions for manage different encoding (but 
it has a disadvantage also: non-english text files becomes at 
least twice larger than original ones). And, once again, there is 
still shabby support of utf8 in some applications.

But my locale is not utf8 (this doesn't mean that I have no utf8 at 
all) and I almost have no troubles when dealing with english, 
russian and even with japaneese texts. Why I must change 
something?

If documentation encoding explicitly will be changed to utf8, I'll 
be forced to use iconv, even for reading it. This is solution, but  
it will make things much less suitable and more time-consuming, so 
I don't want this changes. Using non-utf8 ecoding won't hurt 
anyone.

Outspread of utf8 is not an option: a lot of people use window$, 
but this doesn't mean that I must do the same. Imho utf8 is still 
not suitable enough for some, especially cyrillic systems.
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