[team-gnome-gr] [Bug 488463] Evolution calendar, contacts etc does not support greek characters

["Evolution (bugzilla.gnome.org)" <bugzilla-daemon bugzilla gnome org>]

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  Evolution | Calendar | Ver: 2.12.x




------- Comment #9 from Simos Xenitellis  2007-11-01 13:27 UTC -------
(In reply to comment #3)
> Created an attachment (id=97520)
 --> (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=97520&action=view) [edit]
> screenshot of the problem
>
> This is how evolution contacts look like

This looks like one of the eternal issues of legacy (8-bit) encodings.

In the screenshot you can see that Evolution is trying to be smart and attempts
to convert the 8-bit encoding text into Unicode. It converts from iso-8859-1 to
UTF-8, thus the Latin characters with those accents.

I am not sure if Evolution has special code that checks what the LANG variable
looks like (en_US? so probably iso-8859-1 to UTF-8 please, el_GR? so probably
from iso-8859-7 to UTF-8 please). Even if it had, in your case it would not
help due to the en_US.UTF-8 locale being used.

What do to? Evolution could ask the user in what language the contacts are
written in, then use the correct legacy encoding to convert from. Here there
could be a wizard that shows in a dialog box a contact list entry converted
from different legacy encodings, and asks the user which one is correct (so no
need to ask for language, or maintain a list of language->legacyencoding).

Alternatively, Evolution could try to autoconvert, by guessing from the LANG
variable (assuming the user chose the Greek locale) and also attempting to
figure out the encoding through frequencies of characters in words. 

In any case, such code is useful in several other projects, including

* Importing ID3 tags from songs (vast majority of ID3 tags are of legacy
encoding)
* Figuring out the encoding of filenames in ZIP files (ZIP format does not
specify encoding for filenames)

Some more links on this at
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/unzip/+spec/unzip-detect-filename-encoding

The wizard solution appears easy to implement; the autoconversion with
heuristics would require someone to undertake it as a pet project to create a
generic library to be used by other projects.


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