Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: "Sven Köhler" <skoehler@×××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Re: -unicode USE flag
Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 02:14:39
Message-Id: e4bbu3$9bd$1@sea.gmane.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: -unicode USE flag by Mark Knecht
1 > Sorry - I thought it was clear from my description. Everyone is
2 > using the word 'unicode' in the definition of 'unicode', or so it is
3 > seeming to me. I've managed to get far enough to understand it's a
4 > different way of expressing font usage, I guess, but I don't
5 > understand when someone would want it or when they would not need it.
6
7 do you know utf8, do you know latin1, ISO-8859-15 or other things like
8 these?
9
10 Anyway:
11
12 unicode ist an approach to assign one number to each "letter" or "sign"
13 that is out there in the world. That's all.
14
15 Well, in latin1/ISO-8859-1 you only have a basic rule: 1 byte per character
16
17 You see? Only 1 byte, only 256 numbers and so only space for 256
18 characters - but there are >3000 chinesese symbols.
19
20 So latin1 is a european charset and it contains most of the
21 character/signs europeans need. But the trouble is: if an application
22 internally works with latin1 only, how should it reprensent the chinese
23 symbols?
24
25 Think of your webbrowser: you can use it, to view european pages and
26 also chinese pages. Yes, your browser uses unicode internally and that's
27 very practical, because in unicode, he can represent every
28 character/sign that's out there.
29
30
31
32 Greetings,
33 Sven

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