[aprssig] Please, standardize UTF-8 for APRS

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Tue, 22 Sep 2009, Stephen H. Smith wrote:

> Heikki Hannikainen wrote:
>> I've now set up an UTF-8 message responder. Send an APRS message to 
>> the destination callsign UTF-8, and it will respond with 4 messages:
>>
>> 1. This message is English ASCII text.
>> 2. This message is English UTF-8 text.
>> 3. Finnish/Scandinavian UTF-8 chars: åäö ÅÄÖ
>> 4. Japanese: 日本語 (3 chars)
>
> I've run some quick tests with APRS clients via both the Internet and 
> RF.  Results and screen shots are here on my website:
>
>     <http://wa8lmf.net/UTF8_Message_Tests/>
>
> Apparently the North American version of the D700 (don't know about the 
> Euro version) has only two character sets embedded -- US 7-bit ASCII and 
> some proprietary pre-Unicode/pre-UTF-8 Japanese symbol coding.    The 
> German/Scandinavian string was rendered as "Japanese garbage"!

Something like that could be expected! But at least it doesn't crash, 
which seems to be the main worry. I would have been very surprised if it 
did, since utf-8 strings are, for a non-utf-8-enabled device, just strings 
which the reader won't understand, because they're rendered with the wrong 
glyphs.

Excellent work, Stephen, thank you!

aprs.fi currently breaks these strings, since it's making a an attempt in 
recovering scandinavian letters from another character set, instead of 
being binary/utf-8-clean like findu.com is. There are some kludges 
available to distinquish between UTF-8 and one of the old 8-bit character 
sets (implemented in the 'irssi' IRC client recode plugin), I'll see if 
that can be made to work.

   - Hessu