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#56728 22/10/03 01:22 PM
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Sonja Offline OP
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When will mIRC support various character sets for non-English languages, for example Unicode (utf-8)?

I would like to be able to set a different charset for each channel I go in, because I like chatting in different languages that use different character sets.

Thank you!

Sonja

#56729 24/10/03 07:52 PM
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Self-satisified door
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it seems NEVER frown

#56730 24/10/03 08:01 PM
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Hoopy frood
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If you'd tried the Search feature on the boards you'd have seen that Khaled has previously stated that Unicode support was on his 'to-do list'.


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#56731 25/10/03 11:24 AM
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I know... it's on his to do list but it's on his list about 3 Months

#56732 25/10/03 11:55 AM
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Hoopy frood
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3 months isn't exactly a long time for something big to be waiting to be added. Besides, there's only been one non-bugfix release since then and that was little more than a month after that post. Since that release there's been a small horde of bugs reported or whined about, at what point would Khaled have been able to implement something huge like Unicode? Just because it hasn't been added immediately isn't any reason to assume it never will be.


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#56733 26/10/03 09:30 AM
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Fjord artisan
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I agree. (Well, of course I agree, UTF-8 is the reason I'm on this board.)
But there's about 65 gazillion threads about Unicode already.

#56734 02/11/03 10:21 AM
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I have to say something else on the topic though. It's really not Khaled's fault that mIRC doesn't support UTF-8 yet. It's Microsoft's.

When certain clients on Linux have UTF-8 support, it's because Linux developers have gone very far to implement it, to the point where Unicode support is now almost transparent. I was able to make a small program that supported Unicode through UTF-8/16/32 myself the other day.

However, Microsoft's Unicode support isn't really transparent in its implementation, and programmers that want to use it have to change their code in order to implement it. I've actually heard that the Korean government asked Microsoft to make then an UTF-8 locale and use it in the Korean version of Windows - This never happened, though. So I guess Unicode isn't their top priority.

I just hope they don't release their own proprietary Unicode standard like Apple did. Or perhaps they did already? Not that it's likely to be suitable for IRC, where everything needs to be divided into 8 bits wide blocks.

#56735 09/11/03 02:07 PM
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I disagree. UTF-8 is not a locale, it's a character translation mapping. Although abusing the locale system for "easy" Unicode support is doable, I have to commend Microsoft for not taking the easy route. Proper Unicode support requires more from the application than just treating it like ASCII text. Buffer overflows etc blah blah.

Then again, like I just replied to another thread, it would be the easiest and fastest way to add Unicode support to mIRC, by just converting between UTF-8 and UCS-2 (which is used by Windows), and treating it like any other text, just using the Unicode text input and rendering functions instead. :-)

But the point is, the Unicode support in Windows is good enough. UTF-8 <-> UCS-2 conversion is not exactly difficult to add. I think I could do it in my sleep with both hands tied behind my back.

#56736 09/11/03 04:25 PM
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I don't remember saying that UTF-8 was a locale. What I said was that a locale can use UTF-8 encoded text instead of a 2-byte encoding such as ISO-2022-JP. I don't remember saying it should be treated as ASCII either.

I have noted, though, that Windows uses UTF-16 (Or UCS-2 as you call it) internally. UTF-16 is a transition format just as UTF-8, and isn't significantly different.


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