[GRASS5] documentation encoding

[Glynn Clements]

Jean-Denis Giguere wrote:

> I have started some work on translation of documentation. I think that 
> using utf-8 instead of latin-1 for encoding could help much translation 
> effort. If everyone use the same encoding, it will also help dealing 
> with special characters like & et > issues.

The encoding should be appropriate for the specific locale. E.g. Alex'
Russian translations all use KOI8-R, which is the encoding which is
most commonly used in Russia (far more common than ISO-8859-5 or
UTF-8).

In spite of the hype, UTF-8 is far from being in widespread use. It's
widespread support (in libraries and applications) springs more from a
desire by programmers to avoid having to deal with encoding issues
than actual usage.

IMHO, it would be preferable to use the ISO-8859-* encodings where
possible. ISO-8859-* text can be automatically converted to UTF-8
using iconv, but the reverse isn't necessarily true.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>