[freeciv-data] Re: Russian.ruleset

On Sat, 4 May 2002, Thanasis Kinias wrote:
> > 2. The character you use is not in 7-bit ascii. That makes it very hard to
> > type, and very confusing to read if you happen to have a russian font
> > installed, which uses the upper 128 characters to encode cyrillics. Thus
> > your letter will look like some other (cyrillic) letter inserted in the
> > middle of latin ones.
>
> I chose to use 8-bit ISO Latin-1 encoding instead of sticking to 7-bit
> ASCII because it is used already in Freeciv for, e.g., French, German,
> Spanish, and Portuguese.  If you're trying to display Latin-1 as KOI-8
> you'll have problems with all of these, not just the Russian file.  I
> would strongly recommend figuring out how to set up a UTF-8 locale if
> you need to use Cyrillic.

I agree. We should allow 8-bit, since a lot nations need it and use it.

> I know.  I was just dreaming (I happen to read Cyrillic, Greek, and
> Arabic scripts, so I think it would be neat--but I'm sure I won't
> convince any developers to write BIDI stuff for a game like this).

I think the gtk2 client has (unused) support for utf-8 and BIDI through
the pango library already. But let's not go overboard. It is just a game.

Yours,
Per

"There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary
and those who don't."