UTF-8 with GTK

[Raymond Wan <rwan cs mu oz au>]

Hi all,

	I was playing around with testtext, which comes with GTK+ 1.3.X
and noticed that it can support non-Latin languages (i.e., Japanese) as
long as it is encoded in UTF-8.  I also looked at the manpages of UTF-8
and it said that it is "the way to go for using the Unicode character set
under Unix-style operating systems."

	[Apologies in advance, but my knowledge of Unicode is somewhat
limited...].  I was wondering why is this so?  Sure, I read the rest of
the man pages and it mentioned some of the benefits...however, from the
Japanese point of view (or Chinese, Korean, whatever), where every text
file is most likely in an Asian language, isn't it a waste of space that
some characters will take up 2, 3, or even more bytes (where 1 byte = 8
bits).  If I used an encoding such as Shift-JIS for Japanese or ummmm,
BIG5, I think, for Chinese, won't most characters be two bytes in size?

	I guess what I'm asking is that isn't UTF-8 more for accomodating
Latin-based OS' to read Asian (and Middle Eastern) languages and not for
Asian OS' to read Asian languages?  Presuming I'm right so far, is there a
way to make GTK support alternative encodings like UTF-16 or S-JIS, BIG5,
etc.?

	[Sorry, I realize there is a lot that I've said which indicates
I'm a newbie...which I am.  I guess what I was really getting to is this
last question about GTK support for other encodings.]

	Thank you!

Ray