I've been working on converting my system over to using UTF-8 wherever possible. I've already configured galeon, evolution, gnome-terminal and just about every other graphical application to use UTF-8 by default. I've set my locale to "en_US.UTF-8". And just about everything works just fine. Unfortunately, as I'm not all that familiar with all of the details of an i18n interface, there are a few things that still elude me.
1) I've set up an .Xmodmap file to map my left Windows key to Multi_key so that I can type extended characters. However, I have to run "xmodmap .Xmodmap" manually every time I restart X. I'm guessing that I should put this in an X startup script. A .bashrc equivalent for X. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the proper file to put it in is. 2) Is there a way to get UTF-8 support in a regular text console? The only place I've seen what I believe to be actual UTF-8 output at a regular text console is from apt-listchanges using the "pager" setting. Everything else seems to choke. This is a real problem with ncurses applications like querybts, because they become nearly unusable since it's very difficult to distinguish between actual letters and the garbled output that should be a "window". 3) Assuming that #2 is possible, how can I type extended characters in a text console? While in X, I can, for example, type "Windows Key", Y, =, and get the yen symbol (¥). However, since a text mode terminal doesn't care about any X keybindings, I have no way to type extended characters like that. Is there another method of inputting these characters? Or am I just stuck with the regular set of QWERTY keys? 4) While emacs seems to be an early adopter of new technologies, it seems that emacs support for UTF-8 is still quite sketchy. Saving a file as UTF-8 isn't too difficult, yet opening one is. Am I stuck waiting until emacs 22 for better UTF-8 support, or is there something that can be done in the interim? (especially a solution to allow emacs to recognize UTF-8 encoded files when opening a file). 5) Just to satisfy my own curiosity, could someone explain the difference between all of the different UTF flavors? I've seen UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16, etc. My first guess would be that the number represents the number of bits used to represent any single character. Yet that seems unlikely since UTF-8 has WELL over 255 characters. Could anyone enlighten me? -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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