[GRASS-dev] Re: [GRASS-translations] UTF-8 or ISO?

[Glynn Clements]

Markus Neteler wrote:

> > Martin Landa wrote:
> >> Robert Szczepanek wrote:
> >> >  I am newbie in translations and my question probably is simple one.
> >> >  Which *.po files coding standard is recommended now?
> >> >  UTF or ISO?
> >> >  I continue polish translation (i.e. UTF-8 and ISO-8859-2).
> >>
> >> I guess ISO(?)
> >
> > I think so. If your system supports UTF-8, it will support converting
> > ISO-8859-2 to UTF-8. OTOH, if your system has negligible I18N support,
> > you'll have problems if the files are in UTF-8.
> >
> > Also, using ISO-8859-* encodings helps to discourage people from
> > gratuitous use of features such as "enhanced" punctuation.
> 
> Now, in 2010, is this still valid?

It will probably valid for a long time to come. Any system which
supports UTF-8 will also support ISO-8859-*, but the converse isn't
necessarily true.

The extent to which UTF-8 is less compatible than the locale-specific
encoding will decrease over time, but it's unlikely to reach parity in
the foreseeable future.

> It seems that UTF-8 reached most systems.
> Also the poEdit software converts to UTF-8 while saving which
> I have to convert back with iconv to ISO-8859-15 (I tried DE).

If you feel that you need to use UTF-8, at least ensure that the file
doesn't use any characters outside of the appropriate repertoire, so
that the file can be converted back to ISO-8859-* (etc) by the user if
necessary.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>