Gibberish in Ubuntu when dealing with documents / websites

[Dotan Cohen]

On 2008-11-26, H.S. <hs.samix at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dotan Cohen wrote:
>  > As my native language is not ASCII-compatible, myself and other Ubuntu
>  > users in my area often have problems with Gibberish (wrongly-encoded
>  > text) when exchanging documents with users of non-UTF-8 operating
>  > systems *ahem* MS Windows *ahem*. I would like to know if other people
>  > / locales suffer from this problem. If so, please send to me the
>  > letters of your alphabet so that I can try to compie a list of
>  > problematic letters (see my .sig for examples of some alphabets). I am
>  > trying to write a script that will help decode this Gibberish back
>  > into the correct encoding, but I need to know which letters are
>  > problematic for other Ubuntu users. Thanks.
>  >
>
>
> hmm ... not sure why you face that problem exactly. If the sender is
>  sending in Unicode font and your system understands that (UTF-8
>  perhaps), it should be working.
>
>  If your system is UTF-8 and you are not able to read a message from a
>  another user on another operating system, then either that message is
>  not in UTF-8 or your system does not have the necessary unicode fonts
>  installed. I suppose latter is not the case here. For the former case,
>  that message is most probably in formatted form using some font based on
>  ascii. In that case, as far as I know, there is not much you can do
>  other than to install that particular form and read that message in its
>  original formatted form (most probably html).
>
>  Am I understanding your scenario correctly?
>

The situation is that Hebrew (and possibly other) MS Windows
installations do not write filenames and text documents as UTF-8 by
default. So users who recieve files from MS Windows uses often see
Gibberish.

I am aware of this problem for Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic users (that
is why I have added those characters to my .sig). I want to know what
other locales have the issue. For me and other Hebrew uses the issue
is solved due to the Gibberish translation tool I have written. But I
would like to expand the tool for all Ubuntu users, not just Hebrew.
That is why I ask who else is affected.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il

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