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> I don't know if this has improved over the years, but my initial |
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> experience with unicode was rather negative. The fact that text |
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> files were twice as large wasn't a major problem in itself. The |
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> real showstopper was that importing text files into spreadsheets |
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> and text-editors and word processors failed miseraby. |
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> |
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> I looked at a unicode text file with a binary viewer. It turns out |
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> that a simple text string like "1234" was actually... |
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> "1" binary-zero "2" binary-zero "3" binary-zero "4" binary zero, etc. |
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That's (as someone has already pointed out) UTF-16, which is the default for |
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some Windows tools (but understood in Linux too). (Even UTF-32 exists where |
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all characters are 4 byte wide, but I've never seen it in the wild.) |
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UTF-8 is normally used on Linux (and ASCII chars look exactly the same there); |
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even for "long characters" outside the ASCII range spreadsheets and word |
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processors should not be a problem anymore. |
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-- |
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Andreas K. Hüttel |
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dilfridge@g.o |
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Gentoo Linux developer |
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(council, qa, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice) |
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