[SOLVED] LANG=fr_FR.utf8 vs. french man pages

kikinovak · 12-04-2012, 04:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Didier Spaier

I would certainly prefer the other way round. UTF-8 is the future.

That's why I'll be glad to use it in the future.

Didier Spaier · 12-04-2012, 04:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kikinovak

That's why I'll be glad to use it in the future.

Why not make the future begin right now? In /etc/profile.d/lang.sh I have:

Code:

export LANG=fr_FR.utf8

In /etc/lilo.conf:

Code:

append=" vt.default_utf8=1"

and everything works to my satisfaction.

kikinovak · 12-05-2012, 05:38 AM

I know. I'm using the same here, approximately.

Code:

export LANG=fr_FR.utf8
export LC_COLLATE=fr_FR.utf8

Even then, according to /usr/lib/man.conf, man pages display correctly when latin1-encoded. As far as I understand.

NonNonBa · 12-05-2012, 11:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kikinovak

Of course the cleanest solution would be a script that scans everything in /usr/man, hunts down utf8-encoded man pages and converts them to latin1. This is slightly over my scripting abilities, but I've started to experiment nevertheless.

There are at least two problems:

1) Latin1 codes only the West-European languages. If you convert Polish, for example, you must do it to Latin2. This means your script must be able to know which "Latin" (iso8859) charset to convert a page into according to the language directory it belongs to ;
2) Each charset from iso8859 codes only 256 characters max. while utf-8 can potentially codes all the characters. This means you can't convert from UTF-8 text that contains characters mixing two charsets form iso8859 or not represented in any of them. For example, if a French utf-8 man-pages uses "œ", the conversion will be broken ("œ" is not in latin1, only in latin9).