Re: Correct use of UTF-8 under Unix

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Bram Moolenaar wrote:

> So, what now?  I certainly would like Vim to be able to handle multiple
> encodings.  The easy way out is to let the user set the 'fileencoding' option.
> This is actually already working, with these values:
> 	    ansi	default setting, good for most Western languages
> 	    japan	set to use shift-JIS (Windows CP 932) encoding
> 	    korea	set to use Korean DBCS
> 	    prc		use simplified Chinese encoding
> 	    taiwan	use traditional Chinese encoding

For Japan, Shift-JIS is definitely not enough.  You need at least also
EUC-Japan and iso-2022-jp-2.  For the others the situation is similar.
Emacs uses the MIME names, as does Java.

Also, Emacs subdivides your 'fileencoding' into a
'coding-system-for-read' and a 'coding-system-for-write'.

If in doubt, it is a good idea to follow the Emacs naming.  Emacs is
not yet UTF8 based, but it has thouroughly designed multi-coding
capabilities with many years of experience and it is the only
multilingual system that has been in use on Linux.  Therefore it
would also be very helpful, if your vim was able to read the
multilingual encodings used by Emacs: iso-2022-7bit and emacs-mule.

Thanks to Otfried Cheong's conversion frontend, I am currently using
Emacs with the "unicode-utf8" encoding (is that a MIME name?), but
the other two multilingual encodings will keep staying around for
quite a while, since it will take a lot of effort to move the core
of Emacs to Unicode.

--
phm

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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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