Unicode

[redhat81]

I was wondering if anyone knew why, now that Unicode is available on most every machine out there, people still use encodings such as BIG5 and JIS instead of UTF-8?

[Strike]

Originally posted by redhat81
I was wondering if anyone knew why, now that Unicode is available on most every machine out there, people still use encodings such as BIG5 and JIS instead of UTF-8?
a) Because people are dumb :)
b) Because it really isn't available on most every machine out there. Pretty much every recent OS in the past 5 years or so supports it, yes, but there are still people running Win95 (which doesn't support it natively, in fact I don't think Win98 or 2k do either), as well as older versions of other OSes as well.

Personally, I love UTF-8 and have it set as my default. :)

[st0rmrd]

win2k works with utf-8 and I think that when you type something it is actually in unicode, since in word2000 I managed to write quenya (a tolkien-elven language, that uses unicode in the font file)...

anyhow, I think that in linux I am still using codepages (suse 7.3), how can I tell and how can I change it? should I? (I think I prefer unicode but I'm not sure about the support for fonts)

PS. I noticed that about 50% of my fonts have several codepages to select, say helvetica iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-7 - greek, is that on the same file using unicode or on seperate files and the whole selecting thing is done on the font selecting program?