[kde-linux] Character encoding problem in KDE (from Hellmut Weber)

[Hellmut Weber]

Hi ludo,

> Yes, Herr Weber, I easily believe that you have very similar problems as 
> I have... (I speak and write German myself as you may have guessed, and 
> have problems with files with German names; and also with the 
> transcription of some file _contents_ - but the latter might be another 
> problem altogether...).
For the transcription of contents there is a program called 'recode', it
should be part of every Linux distribution, see ' man recode'

> What I wanted to ask you now is what you mean by "Sticking with 
> ASCII-127". Do you mean that I have to select a certain character set 
> somewhere in KDE (configuration center or elsewhere) or even in Debian 
> (if you use it, that is) or should I simply avoid using certain 
> characters (like "ü" or  I actually have consistently avoided blanks - I 
> use underscores) or do I have to change my keyboard?
With my formulation 'Stick to ASCII-127' I want to say that you will be
on the secure side if you make it a personal convention, a personal
habit to use for file and directory names (and also for other things
like printer names) only the caracters with the ascii numbers less than
127. And you have to avoid the small ascii numbers up to around 32 (here
I'm not sure) too.
AND as you certainly will have noticed too, it is wise to avoid blanks
in file and directory names too,

I certainly appreciate the ongoing efforts by many people to make the
use of other character sets possible, but for the time being IMHO the
situation is still very unsatisfactory. So I stick to this convention.

And I have a little shell-script which transforms names to this
convention (e.g. 'Günther Krauß' as a file name to 'Guenther_Krauss' and
the like.)

BTW This situation reminds me a bit the 'late stone age' of computer 
science, when the ASCII standard was still rather young. *The* most 
important player of that time (guess! IBM ;-) continued nevertheless to 
use its EBCDIC encoding.

HTH

Hellmut

-- 
Dr. Hellmut Weber         mail at hellmutweber.de
Degenfeldstraße 2         tel   +49-89-3081172
D-80803 München-Schwabing mobil +49-172-8450321
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