Re: UTF8 encoding

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Tuesday 05 July 2005 12:03 pm, Juergen Wieferink wrote:
> Harald Harders wrote:
> > If I remember correctly, the low byte of UTF-8 is identical with either
> > latin1 or latin9. Thus, using =BBset encoding iso_8859_1=AB should also=
 work
> > with UTF-8 (and in fact it worked for me today at work) as long as you
> > don't use characters above \377.
>=20
> But aren't the umlauts "=E4=F6=FC" multibyte characters in UTF-8? =20

As I understand it, a single character glyph may have more than one legal
representation in UTF-8.  So =E4 =F6 =FC each have a one-byte representation
(\344 \366 \374 if the encoding is iso8559-1 or iso8559-15) and also have
a multibyte unicode representation (C3A4 C3B6 C3BC).


> This is=20
> at least what hexdump says to sample files.  And I can say
> empirically that it doesn't work to just use UTF-8 scripts
> containing umlauts with gnuplot -- at least with SuSE9.3.

gnuplot> show locale

        LC_CTYPE is en_US.UTF-8
        LC_NUMERIC is C
        LC_TIME is C

gnuplot> set xlabel "=E4=F6=FC"
gnuplot> set term png
Terminal type set to 'png'
Options are 'nocrop font verdana 12 size 640,480 '
gnuplot> set output 'test.png'
gnuplot> plot sin(x)

  (output image attached)


=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195