GNOME and migrating to utf-8

[Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas online no>]

Hi everyone.

Recently some of the translators decided to move to utf-8 encoding for
parts of their
translations, which in it self is a step in the right direction. The
problem as far as I know
is that the current GNOME codebase isn't prepared to handle utf-8
encoded strings
in .desktop-, .oaf-, .glade-files etc. 

It would probably be ok to use this encoding for the .po files only, but
the recent transition
to use xml-i18n-tools moves the translation of strings from the before
mentioned files into the .po files themselves. This causes problems for
various parts of GNOME such as the
control-center menu, the foot-menu, gnome-vfs.mime handlers etc. The
problem of
GNOME not handling this is also visible in that we can't display the KDE
menus correctly
since these are in utf-8.

We should probably wait until 2.0 before we migrate, but I'd like to
start a discussion
on this topic so that we can shed some light on all implications and how
to attack this
in the best possible way.

Cheers
Kjartan Maraas



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