Re: Changing encoding of an already loaded buffer

On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 2:04 PM A. Wik <awik32@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 9 Dec 2020 at 20:20, Gabriele F <gbfv@tiscali.it> wrote:
> >
> > On 09/12/2020 18.47, A. Wik wrote:
> > > I don't include utf8 in my default fencs setting because that has the
> > > side effect of using utf8 for any newly created files.
> >
> > Completely off-topic, if you don't have particular needs ...
>
> I just like to keep things "8-bit clean". As long as all tools used
> to process the files are also 8-bit clean, nothing gets corrupted.
> Alas, it does mean files are sometimes displayed incorrectly. But in
> my experience, it gets messy when I introduce UTF-8.
>
> > I imagine most of the critics are from countries that never needed more
> > than ASCII
>
> There is something to it. People who use only ASCII seem to like
> UTF-8 better than those who frequently use non-English characters.
> I've seen claims that UTF-8 is "compact" but compared to strictly
> 8-bit character sets like Latin-1 it is not.
>
> -aw

- For pure 7-bit ASCII, all three of us-ascii, Latin1 and UTF-8 are
equivalent, they represent the data identically.
- For "Western Latin" (French, Spanish, etc.) Latin1 is slightly more
economical than UTF-8. How much more depends on the percent abundance
of accented letters not found in ASCII.
- When mixing several scripts (at least two of Latin, Greek, Cyrillic,
Hebrew, Arabic, CJK ideographic, etc.) within a single document, I
know no better encoding than UTF-8. In an 8-bit charset like Latin1
you have only (at most) 256 different valid character values, and that
is much too few as soon as you start mixing scripts: be it for a
juxtalinear edition of the Bible (with the original Hebrew, Aramaic or
Greek text next to a translation and/or commentary) or for a
Greek-Russian or Russian-Finnish dictionary. And of course even for a
single CJK script, no 8-bit script can do the job.

Best regards,
Tony.

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