Improved UTF-8 support for the Linux kernel

Improved UTF-8 support for the Linux kernel

[Simos Xenitellis]

Hi All,
The current UTF-8 keyboard input (for the console) of the Linux kernel
does not support  "composing" or writing characters with accents. This
affects quite a few languages that require accents (French, German,
Danish, Swedish?, Greek, cyrillic-based?, others?.). 

In general, UTF-8
console support is good to display text in different character sets,
enabling to configure a distribution to use UTF-8 locales for both
console/Xorg.

While looking into the problem, I noticed that there is work to make
Linux console handle Unicode better.

Two links are of interest
A. Improved UTF-8 support for the Linux kernel, by Chris Heath
http://chris.heathens.co.nz/linux/utf8.html
B. Notes on the Linux console, by Innocenti Maresin
http://www.comtv.ru/~av95/linux/console/

Discussion on these issues take place at
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/nlo.lists.linux-utf8

Chris Heath has a set of incremental patches
(http://chris.heathens.co.nz/linux/utf8.html) to enhance Unicode for the
console.
I noticed that he contacted this list in May 2003
(http://seclists.org/lists/linux-kernel/2003/May/7956.html) but
unfortunatelly the discussion was diverted to coding styles.

Is there an interest for re-submission of mentioned patches for
inclusion in the kernel (yeah, provided coding style is normalised)?

Simos

p.s.
I am not sending this e-mail on behalf of any of the authors, just
myself.