Re: gEDA-user: Text encodings [WAS: Re: Open GL survey (for PCB)]

[der Mouse <mouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> - but pcb supports iso-latin-1 8-bit at the moment, aside from the
>> missing font issue.
> Its dangerous do document that we support iso-latin-1, lest anyone
> draws themselves fonts, and then gets cross if we decree in future,
> that PCB text is in UTF-8.

Does it do Latin-1, or does it do raw octet streams and you get
whatever your font gives you with them (8859-7 if you use an 8859-7
font, for exmaple)?  For example, does it know that 1/4 of the possible
octet values (00-1f and 80-9f) are not printable characters, or is it
willing to put most/all of those into strings and let the chips fall
where they may when it comes to display?

I consider this an important distinction; I've seen two things already
which are, strictly speaking, unimplementable on many Unix variants
because they require that OS things be character strings when they
actually are octet strings.  (What are they?  ssh, which specifies
UTF-8 for usernames and passwords, and POSIX extended tar header
format, which specifies UTF-8 for file names.  But on the Unix variants
I've worked with, usernames, passwords, and filenames are not character
strings; they are octet strings, with conversion to and from characters
happening elsewhere if at all.)

I'm not sure whether I think switching PCB's philosophy from octet
strings to character strings would be a good move.  (I think it would
be difficult to do, but that's a separate issue.)

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