[Gdal-dev] RFC DRAFT: Unicode support in GDAL

[Frank Warmerdam]

Mateusz Loskot wrote:
> Interesting quotes:
> "Note: You can now store Shapefile in UTF-8. However, Shapefile encoded
> in UTF-8 will only be recognized in ArcGIS Desktop."
> 
> I'm not sure how to understand this quote, but I also believe
> every client software that works with Shapefile format is free to
> support Unicode in Shapefile files, isn't it?

Mateusz,

I presume the above note is because there is no "standard" way of indicating
that text in a .dbf file is in UTF-8.  I persume ArcGIS is using some custom
flag to keep track of this.  If we can figure out what they did, we could
also honour it.

Best regards,
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