[aprssig] Please, standardize UTF-8 for APRS

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Tue, 22 Sep 2009, Kai Gunter Brandt wrote:

> Heikki Hannikainen wrote:
>> 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)
>
> Does not display correct on my TM-D710
>
> But it do display ÆØÅ and æøå when sending from TeraTermPro to a TM-D710
> in APRS mode: www.scannernytt.info/LA3QMA/letters.jpg
> So it should be possible to get a result.

I'm afraid you're missing the point. The aim here is not to make these 
characters to work with the TM-D710 or any other existing rig with 
old/existing software.

The aim is to make it possible to make all future software (and maybe some 
of the future embedded devices, too, if they have the memory for the 
fonts) to support all languages properly, without the need for the users 
to flip switches depending on whether they're sending messages to US, to 
Japan, or to Norway. And being abble to send English / latin alphabet 
messages to ASCII-only devices, too, without flipping switches.

UTF-8 enables us to do just that. Currently, the old devices, like the 
TM-D710 do not support UTF-8, so it is not possible to get a result in 
this test.

But as long as it does not crash when it sees these, I'm happy. That was 
the result of this test.

Some software author might want to add a switch in the software to select 
between different charsets (utf-8, shift-jis, or iso-8859-15...), so that 
the end-user could send messages to some of the old devices, or receive 
messages from them. But it is a pain for the user. The user doesn't want 
to flip switches depending on the language or the recipient's device type. 
UTF-8 has been widely implemented on the Internet (together with MIME 
content-type headers), so we don't much see these switches any more. 
Firefox 3.0 at least still has them in the View -> Character Encoding 
menu, but you very rarely need to touch them.

I've added ÆØ/æø and ßüÜ in the third UTF-8 message.

   - Hessu