Re: File encoding, ISO-8859-1 versus UTF-8, was: Error in xmaxima for Spanish language

On 8/24/26 9:00 PM, Robert Dodier wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 4:57 PM T Rex<[email protected]> wrote:
>> (%i1) plot2d(sin(x), [x, -%pi, %pi], [plot_format,xmaxima ]);
>> Error in startup script: couldn't read file "/app/plugins/maxima/share/maxima/5.50.0/xmaxima/msgs/es.msg": invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character
> I'm pretty sure that the problem is that es.msg contains text encoded
> in ISO-8859-1 and Xmaxima is expecting UTF-8, as the latter is the
> default for many, but maybe not all systems.
>
> A workaround is to launch Xmaxima and tell it to expect a different
> character encoding. Try this:
>
>    $ LC_CTYPE=es.ISO-8859-1 xmaxima
>
> at the command prompt. Does that help? If it doesn't make the problem
> go away, maybe someone else can suggest something.
>
> The bigger issue that I can see is that there are a number of files in
> Maxima, some of them related to Xmaxima and some to other things,
> which are ISO-8859-1 encoded. What should we do with those? It is a
> trivial process to convert them to UTF-8, but will that cause trouble
> for people using those files on non-UTF-8-default systems? In
> particular, is Windows happier with ISO-8859-1 than UTF-8?
>
> Thanks for any insights.
>
> best,
>
> Robert
>
> PS. Here are the files that I can find that are ISO-8859-1 encoded.
> Everything else appears to be ASCII, UTF-8, non-text data, or a
> designated test file for some encoding.
>
> ./changelogs/ChangeLog: ISO-8859 text
Presumably ok to convert to utf8?
> ./doc/tutorial/pt/max.tex: LaTeX 2e document, ISO-8859 text, with very
> long lines
> ./doc/tutorial/pt/minimal-maxima.tex: LaTeX 2e document, ISO-8859 text
> ./doc/tutorial/ru/minimal-maxima.tex: LaTeX 2e document, ISO-8859 text
TeX documents are probably ok with iso8859?
> ./interfaces/emacs/imaxima/README: Lisp/Scheme program, ISO-8859 text
READMEs are probably ok to convert to utf8?
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/InfoBefore_de.txt: ISO-8859 text, with
> CRLF, LF line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/InfoBefore_es.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/InfoBefore_fr.txt: ISO-8859 text, with
> CRLF, LF line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/InfoBefore_pt_BR.txt: ISO-8859 text, with
> CRLF line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/InfoBefore_pt.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/InfoBefore_ru.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/readme_de.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/readme_es.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/readme_fr.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/readme_it.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/readme_pt_BR.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/readme_pt.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
> ./interfaces/xmaxima/win32/readme_ru.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF
> line terminators
All of these are probably ok as is for windows? But maybe convert 
InfoBefore_fr.txt to use CRLF everywhere instead of with a mix of CRLF 
and LF terminators?
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