[PLUG] Linux and Unicode

[John Jason Jordan]

OK, supposedly my Ubuntu-64 Breezy computer is all Unicode compliant
and stuff. At the same time, evidently most of the programs I run on it
are not. The big ones seem to be - OpenOffice.org, Scribus, inter alia,
but some important little ones are messing up bigtime. On the other
hand, maybe the problem is not related to Unicode. I'd like to report
to the developers, but I'm not sure how to state the problem.

Case in point: Over the weekend I edited the tags for a little over 300
classical pieces before restoring them to my iPod. I used EasyTag. The
process went just fine. Except that before actually uploading them to
the iPod I needed to go to the university, which meant I had to close
EasyTag. The edited tags looked fine when I closed it, but when I
reopened it later many with "foreign" characters were badly hosed. You
don't want to know how Antonin Dvořák's name came out. All I will say
is that I don't think he spelled his name with a copyright symbol. The
weird part is why the tags looked fine when I closed EasyTag, but after
EasyTag reopened the files, it displayed them incorrectly. I mean, if
it couldn't display the character properly, then why did it display
properly when I entered it from the keyboard?

I decided I'd just re-edit the offending tags in gtkpod before syncing
to the iPod. I opened gtkpod, but quickly noticed that I must have set
the "Always automatically screw things up" option to Yes. It took a
while, but I finally managed to get it to delete its database, which I
think was based on the files before I edited them. Then I re-opened all
the files. That was even worse. Everything that was not one of the keys
on an American typewriter came out as a space. Dvořák came out Dvo  k.
So now we have a different issue -- EasyTag substitutes something else,
and gtkpod just deletes.

What I'm trying to figure out is what is going on. There are different
kinds of problems. Some programs react one way, some another. I read
all I can about Unicode, but the literature about Unicode on the net
does not explain what to do when applications can't take Unicode
characters. At least, I couldn't find it.

Does anyone have any idea what I am talking about?