Re: Could Lua itself become UTF8-aware?

[Paul Merrell <marbux@...>]

On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 12:23 AM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> The current situation is that comments and strings are byte sequences
> and anything is legal inside them.
>
> If it looks like UTF-8 on your screen, that is because the current setting
> of your locale or your clever text editor or mail client makes it look so.
> At least one  member of this list and I suspect several others still uses
> ISO-8859-1 in e-mails and probably their comments and strings would be
> ISO-8859-1 too. Note that any program that expects ISO-8859 is not fazed
> by UTF-8, it just displays it wrong, whereas a program that expects UTF-8
> and gets ISO-8859 is confused.
>

But if  what the user is seeing on the screen is  little
character-size hollow rectangles, it's more likely that he's using a
font that doesn't support the particular human language's character
set. The lion's share of the TTF fonts out there have extremely
limited UTF-8 support.

A a few free fonts that look good and have pretty broad UTF-8 support
(both are available in most (all?) Linux package management systems).
:

* Arial (one of the Microsoft core fonts); [1]

* Deja Vu font family (open source) [2]

Best regards,

Paul


[1] http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

[2] <https://sourceforge.net/projects/dejavu/>. See unicover.txt in
the source files for the extent of human language coverage.


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