[PLUG] Linux and Unicode

[Paul Heinlein]

On Mon, 5 Jun 2006, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> 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. [....]

In a terminal window (xterm or whatever you normally use), run the 
locale utility. It'll tell you what language and character set your 
shell environment are using. E.g.,

[/tmp]$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

If your LC_CTYPE variable doesn't end in '.UTF-8', then you're 
probably not getting full Unicode support. I've got some notes on all 
this online:

   http://www.madboa.com/geek/utf8/

One easy test is to launch EasyTag under temp environment:

   LANG=en_US.UTF-8 easytag

If that does the trick, then you'll want to alter your default shell 
environment.

If you still have troubles, let me know. Debian-based systems use some 
non-obvious tricks -- like relying on /etc/locale.gen -- that might 
need some explanation.

-- Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>