Ubuntu encodings

[Dieter Schicker]

Hi,

maybe I don't exactly get what you mean but your view seems somehow
western centristic to me. You might not believe it but there _are_
actually people out there who need other encodings than latin1. For me
it's logical that Ubuntu uses UTF-8 as default encoding because it's the
lowest common denominator (also lowest seems the wrong term for
UTF-8 :-)). And since we are on Linux you can easily change the default
encoding  (and also the encoding of special applications) according to
your needs.

Cheers
Dieter

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 21:20 -0400, Joe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've just migrated from FreeBSD to Ubuntu 6.06 (after about one month on
> FreeBSD--previously was on WinXP [actually it still dual boots there]).
> I had a problem with reloading a PostgreSQL 8.1 database from BSD (it
> failed to load several tables with messages about invalid characters).
> Looking at the database setup I found all the databases had been created
> with UTF-8 encoding, although I do not recall any indication in the
> setup or configuration that implied or stated that UTF-8 was going to be
> used.  Since I wanted to move forward, I chose to recreate the database
> with LATIN1 encoding.  This time the reload was successful and a PHP
> application that accesses the database had no problem displaying its
> pages.
> 
> However, when I tried to add a record, I got "ERROR: could not find
> tsearch config by locale".  The table in question uses the PostgreSQL
> tsearch2 module and the default locale (which I presume was reloaded
> from BSD and XP) is "C" (or SQL_ASCII in PG terms).  I did a preliminary
> check and it seems I need to add LATIN1 as a special encoding for
> tsearch2 or make LATIN1 the default encoding.  It also appears like it
> would be easier if I recreated the entire PG installation with either
> LATIN1 encoding (or SQL_ASCII).
> 
> I realize most of the above is not really Ubuntu-related and are more
> appropriate for a PG list.  However, I wanted to provide this background
> to ask the question "Why would I want to stay with UTF-8?".  I'll be
> glad to read any document that someone points me to that explains why
> Ubuntu chooses UTF-8 as the default, apparently for everything.  For
> example, Firefox insists on using "Unicode (UTF-8)" even after I change
> it to Western (ISO-8859-1) so that I can view Spanish n-tilde and other
> characters from the database.  I presume this is because 'locale' says
> LC_TYPE is en_US.UTF-8, but this is in spite of the HTML page having a
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
> 
> right at the beginning.
> 
> I'm sorry for being so long winded on my first post.  I did some
> research in the Ubuntu wiki beforehand and found the page on LocaleConf
> but the comments were not very helpful.  For example, the author says "A
> good rule is to choose utf-8 locales," but does not provide any reason
> for that being good.  The section "For Anti-UTF-8 people" also seems to
> assume that there are two kinds of people:  those for UTF-8 and those
> against it, without no one in between having any doubts as to why one
> would rather stay with ISO-8859-1 if one has little or no interaction
> with other encodings.
> 
> I would appreciate any help or pointers to further reading.
> 
> Joe
> 
>