How to NOT use UTF-8

[linolium]

Yes, I know I am probably going to get flamed for this, but the topic is indeed how to not use UTF-8:

How to NOT use UTF-8

Why?

Because it is simpler to not have to configure each application to use Unicode and deal with inconsistencies and bugs. It also makes your box a lot more interoperable with Windows via FTP, SSH, or whatever it may be. Because it just works.

What works, you may ask? Accented letters do. Or at least the French ones, e.g. éàêíèôà. If you are getting a bunch of question marks displayed in place of the accents in bash or in a console, or over SSH perhaps in PuTTY, then you are most likely suffering from this problem. Instead of converting to Unicode and having to worry about convmv and everything else, it is just easier to fall back on ISO-8859. I feel I have a responsibility to post this because I spent about a week trying to fix it, and finally realized the simple solution.

How?

Step One

Make sure you have your locale for ISO-8859 in /etc/locale.gen:

[Dralnu]

Um, what about using both?

I went to convert to UTF-8, had problems, and now I've got ISO and UTF in my locales, and everything seems to work. UTF, where applicable, works, and so does most every thing else...
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The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

[Crono81]

linolium, do you know how to get rid of the unicode encoding from the localized man pages? All the italian man pages have A2 A""" and others strange chars.

I tried to remove unicode from USE, reemerged man, groff and the applications with the italian man pages, but nothing...

[Konsti]

How funny is this, I started a thread this morning on HowTo get rid of this. I must admint it was a rant partly.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-518929.html
I must have overlooked this one.

Is it right the issue ssh'ing into a unicode box messes up everything can't really be fixed?

[linolium]

@Dralnu: I suppose you are correct. I have taken -unicode out of my use flags and recompiled everything and it still works. Thus I have decided to remove the portion from the first post.

@Crono81: I have never used non-english man pages but my only idea would be that it is characters not supported in the locale. I am probably wrong but perhaps someone else would care to enlighten us?

@Konsti: I searched for hours on end for something and I never even thought it would be something as simple as setting LANG to have an ISO-8859-1 locale in it. Hopefully this thread will come up when people are searching for the question-mark problem and such. Whether it is the only way of fixing it, I don't know, but everything else I tried did not completely fit my requirements.

[numeritos]

In my /etc/env.d/02locale I have LC_ALL variable instead of LANG. Is it the same?[/topic]

[linolium]