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Re: [gNewSense-users] Cyrillic presentation in gNS wiki


From: Sam Geeraerts
Subject: Re: [gNewSense-users] Cyrillic presentation in gNS wiki
Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:41:36 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla-Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (X11/20080509)

Sam Geeraerts wrote:
Sam Geeraerts wrote:
Dmitri Gabinski wrote:
Hi!

I cannot understand, how I can contract the site admin(s), so am posting here.

When trying to edit Russian wiki pages (via Firefox 3.1 beta2, if that matters), I encounter the following problem: Cyrillic characters are replaced with HTML surrogates, thus becoming such chains as Для удаления и Editing is is way too labor-consuming and you cannot, for example, use spell check.

Look, it’s the XXI century, why not use Unicode?

Best regards,

Dmitri Gabinski

I agree that applications that still can't handle Unicode are very annoying. However, it looks like your problem is not Pmwiki's fault. If you force the text encoding for the wiki to UTF-8 in your browser, the characters will not be transformed to HTML entities. That's not the solution, though, because then the text looks messed up in its default encoding.

The problem is that the wiki is served with a charset of ISO-8859-1 in the HTTP headers. So all the content up until now has been entered in that encoding. If the server configuration would be changed to UTF-8, all the content would have to be converted to that as well. I don't know how difficult that is, but as you point out, the wiki can't sanely be edited in non-ASCII character sets without such a switch.

Maybe Brian can shed some light on this?


I did some research: apparently the conversion can be done with recode [1].

There's also a PmWiki recipe to convert input on the fly [2], but I think it's only useful if the content is already in UTF-8. It seems intended to catch input from a browser that is forced to another encoding (or one that can't handle UTF-8).

[1] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/UTF-8
[2] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/UTF8Conv


Possibly the Unicode Input Tool/Converter add-on for Firefox/Icecat [1] can help you edit the wiki in the meantime. It has a 'Conversion' tab where you can convert between Unicode and HTML entities. So it's not a transparent solution, but at least you won't have to figure out the HTML entities yourself.

The license is a bit unclear, so I asked the author about it. He says the next version will be dual licensed under LGPL 2.1/MPL 1.1 and he will take requests for other licenses under consideration. I initially thought there was an issue with the Unicode database, but apparantly it's DFSG-free.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5235
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/07/msg00034.html




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