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

[Armin Burger]

When I remeber well, you have to specify globally in the Windows 
registry if the .dbf of shapefiles are encoded in UTF. But if you do so 
and then load a shapefile not in UTF then the special characters are 
displayed wrong.

So ArcGIS has not really a flexible support for UTF, at least not for 
shapes.

armin

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> 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,