[GRASS-dev] fonts and character encoding

[Hamish]

Glynn Clements wrote:
> Tcl and Python both use Unicode internally, and automatically convert
> to the locale's encoding when calling system functions. So if the user
> types a value for e.g. "d.text text=..." into the GUI, the sequence of
> bytes which end up in the corresponding argv[] will be in the locale's
> encoding.
..
> But, in general, the GUI should probably stick with the locale's
> encoding, as that's what external commands will normally be expecting.
..
> Needless to say, this won't work on Windows. You can get the Windows
> codepage by parsing the output from "mode con cp /status", although
> there might be better solutions. iconv appears to accept cp??? for
> most of the common ones (e.g. cp437 = US, cp850 = western Europe,
> etc).


I was thinking about this with WRT to the meta-data systems.

e.g. say a raster map's units are °C or kg/m³ or µg/l.

Could "r.support units=" support that or would a user have to edit the
cell_misc/$MAP/units file themselves? And if they did edit it by hand,
would the (new) file be compatible with what GRASS expects? Would
d.legend, GUI profile tool, etc, transfer the degree symbol (or whatever)
unharmed? Could the map be transfered to another (foreign) system intact?


Hamish