Disclaimer: All information collected here is verified only for the most recent supported operating systems (currently Scientific Linux 5 and Windows XP) and for the most recent versions of centrally installed software (usually RPM's under Linux and Netinstall packages under XP).
Why UTF8
It is best explained in numerous articles in the internet such as the [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html UTF8 and Unicode FAQ]
Using UTF8
UTF8 support in programs
To test the UTF8 awareness of different programs you can download an excellent [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt UTF8 demo file]
Terminal programs
test the programs by issuing the command
cat UTF-8-demo.txt
in the terminalxterm
- you have to use an UTF-8 Locale such as en_US.UTF-8 (see above)
- you have to select an ISO10646-1 font for the xterm
both can be achieved with the command
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 xterm -fn '-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1' &
konsole and gnome-terminal
- if you use an UTF-8 Locale such as en_US.UTF-8 (see above) it works out of the box, otherwise you have to change the encoding to UTF-8 in the settings and terminal menu respectively
Mail readers
- test the mail readers by sending the UTF-8-demo.txt file as an attachment to yourself
pine
- very incomplete UTF-8 support, not suitable for proper display of mails with varying encodings, not recommended
alpine
you have to use an UTF8-capable terminal and to use an UTF-8 Locale (see above)
- as you can verify with the test file, UTF-8 support is fairly good but still far from being complete
thunderbird
- versions 1.5.0.12 and above should work out of the box
- the netinstall package under Windows XP does currently set two options preventing a display with varying character encodings (TODO: recipy)
Other software
less
- to display UTF-8 text the ENV variable LESSCHARSET must be set to utf-8 and you have to use an UTF-8 capable terminal (see above)
- a test with less UTF-8-demo.txt shows the same results as tests