Can I haz full unicode support @forums plz?

[Zero999]

Why is this an issue and why is it needed on an English speaking forum? If people will happily post in their favorite languages it will be a mess.

? (up, down, left, right arrows)

¹ ² ³ × ÷ ± (superscript 1, 2, 3, multiply, divide, plus/minus)

?  (Omega)

®  © ™ ((R), (C), TM)

° (degree)

? ¼ ? ½ ? ¾ ? (1/8 1/4 3/8 1/2 5/8 3/4 7/8)

Some gets through. Some doesn't. Remembering what does and doesn't work is annoying.

E: For giggles,a few more by row:
¬!"£$%^&*()_+
|¡?£¼???™±°¿
??E®?¥??ØÞƧЪ???
¦<>©‘’Nº×÷

The forum supports superscript and subscript, so the superscript and fraction characters aren't needed. It also makes the fractions easier to read because they're slightly larger ¹/₂ and the letter o in superscript makes a good degree sign 180^o.

Testing ? greater than or equal to, ? less than or equal to.

[EEVblog]

SMF has the ability to do this with a single click on a button in the maintenance section (assuming no other issues), the problem is finding issues with exiting content (assuming it "just works" of course).
So it would likely have to be done on a copy of the forum first that is available to the public so that the checking of existing content can be crowd sourced, but it's not like there will be thousands who will bother to do this. Even then there could be old posts that get corrupted in some way.

[EEVblog]

Why is this an issue and why is it needed on an English speaking forum? If people will happily post in their favorite languages it will be a mess.

Yes, I do not want people to start posting in other languages.
If language is only major reason for wanting to switch to Unicode then I'm afraid the answer is going to be no.

[Zero999]

Why is this an issue and why is it needed on an English speaking forum? If people will happily post in their favorite languages it will be a mess.

Yes, I do not want people to start posting in other languages.
If language is only major reason for wanting to switch to Unicode then I'm afraid the answer is going to be no.

I agree, but I don't think that is the main reason why people want it. Greek characters, such as the Ohm symbol, are probably the deciding factor. I know there's the Latex math plug-in but it's inconvenient and won't work when scripting is disabled, as is often the case for those using this site behind a firewall.

[Ampera]

Bwargh. Stay away with all that charset confusion.

Anything else but 7 Bit ASCII is to be considered bad!

Lol, only the best computers use EBCDIC.

[tooki]

Why is this an issue and why is it needed on an English speaking forum? If people will happily post in their favorite languages it will be a mess.

Yes, I do not want people to start posting in other languages.
If language is only major reason for wanting to switch to Unicode then I'm afraid the answer is going to be no.

Nobody is suggesting that there suddenly be threads held in Cherokee and Tibetan!!! Talk about reductio ad absurdum...

Supporting foreign characters is highly useful for us English speakers asking help of others in translating texts we cannot read. Google translate can only go so far, you know??

[tooki]

SMF has the ability to do this with a single click on a button in the maintenance section (assuming no other issues), the problem is finding issues with exiting content (assuming it "just works" of course).
So it would likely have to be done on a copy of the forum first that is available to the public so that the checking of existing content can be crowd sourced, but it's not like there will be thousands who will bother to do this. Even then there could be old posts that get corrupted in some way.

FWIW, converting text from ASCII to Unicode is generally unproblematic, since everything in ASCII has a complete representation in Unicode. Going the other way is a goddamned nightmare, of course!!

In fact, modern OSes use Unicode internally anyway, converting most text inputs to Unicode in the system libraries.

[frozenfrogz]

Seems like I hit a nerve here...

My request is not related to being able to talk in Croatian or Hindi with other people, but I run into the editor barrier quite often.
As I stated in the opening post it is more an inconvenience that annoys me from time to time and I see a lot of benefits on the usability side if the displayed in the editor vs. displayed after posting was sorted out one way or the other.

Some real world examples of the past couple of weeks I ran into:

• Writing the Cyrillic name of my "RKSB-104" failed. That way it is pretty hard talking about e.g. Russian schematics.
  
• Spelling a polish name correctly failed (I wanted to be obliging).
• Mathematical equations are very likely to end up as garbled nonsense.

This affects forum posts and also private messages.

[wraper]

Why is this an issue and why is it needed on an English speaking forum? If people will happily post in their favorite languages it will be a mess.

Yes, I do not want people to start posting in other languages.
If language is only major reason for wanting to switch to Unicode then I'm afraid the answer is going to be no.

If this was an issue, then there would be a lot of non English posts already. For example, I don't see problems writing in German, Dutch or many other languages using Latin alphabet.
Example: Straße, šprotes.
Even if some letters are missing, it's not a big issue for such.

[Monkeh]

The forum supports superscript and subscript, so the superscript and fraction characters aren't needed. It also makes the fractions easier to read because they're slightly larger ¹/₂ and the letter o in superscript makes a good degree sign 180^o.

Testing ? greater than or equal to, ? less than or equal to.

They're a huge pain in the arse to use. Also, superscript (at least for the values included in the deficient CP1252) works. It has a good set of characters.. for 1985.

Again, it's not about what you can bodge in with this editor - if I've written something in a normal fashion using a non-broken charset, I should be able to paste it here and have it display. It's 2017: We should be far, far beyond these daft limitations.

Even then there could be old posts that get corrupted in some way.

As opposed to all the old, and new, posts which are corrupted and will continue to be?

??

Have some eighth ohm corruption.

[rs20]

Yeah, sorry Dave, I can agree (and indeed was one of the first to put forward in this thread) that the migration might be arduous and perhaps not worth the trouble, but I really disagree that having proper unicode support is actually worse than the status quo. Unicode is far, far more* than just unfamiliar languages, and as already put forward, snippets of other languages are perfectly justified anyway.

* Having an ohm symbol that isn't as misaligned as in 5k would be a great start...

[A Hellene]

Today, even eight bitters support extended character sets...






-George

[A Hellene]

By the way, let me translate what the 84x48 dot-matrix LCD above says, word-by-word:

At the 'Runtime.jpg':
-Line 1: 12.20 V
-Line 2:  64.8 m?
-Line 3: 135.8 A
...meaning:
-Line 1: 12.20 V
-Line 2:  64.8 mohm (m+Omega)
-Line 3: 135.8 A

And at the 'Runtime.jpg':
-Line 1:
-Line 2:  ??
-Line 3:   ??.
-Line 4: : 1.05
-Line 5: ??
-Line 6: 22 ?. 2017
...loosely meaning: Lead(-Acid) accumulator (=battery) Desulfator
-Line 1: Desulfator
-Line 2:[of] accumulators
-Line 3:(of) Lead(-Acid).
-Line 4: Version: 1.05
-Line 5: GeorgeKolovos (no White Space, due to LCD width limit)
-Line 6: Jul. 22, 2017

Makes any sense?
This is what I have posted:



-George