[rfc-i] Data point [Re: Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-utf8-rfcs-03.txt]

[Brian E Carpenter]

Paul

> In specific, a UTF8ized version of this specific draft can be found at <http://www.vpnc.org/temp/draft-hoffman-utf8-rfcs-03.utf8>. I'll do the same for future drafts.

Thanks. My results on Windows XP:

1. It displays correctly using Firefox 2.0.0.7 with View/Character Encoding/UTF-8.

2. When saved to disk from Firefox, the resulting file does not display
correctly in Wordpad (the UTF-8 characters appear in what I guess is the
ISO 8859-1 interpretaion). I can't see any options in Wordpad to switch
the view to UTF-8, although Wordpad purports to be able to save in Unicode.
However, it seems that the file saved by Firefox is not UTF-8.

2a. When the file is viewed in Notepad, the UTF-8 characters are correct.
(However, since Notepad doesn't understand Unix-style carriage control, the
whole draft is displayed as 17 extremely long lines.)

3. When I cut and paste from Firefox into Wordpad, the UTF-8 characters
display correctly. However, there is a spontaneous change of font
from Arial to SimSun at the first UTF-8 character.

3a. Wordpad by default offers to save the file in RTF format, which is
proprietary. When I override this and tell Wordpad to save in Unicode,
the resulting TXT file does display correctly when re-opened with
Wordpad or Notepad. However, Firefox displays scrambled egg when told
to decode it as UTF-8; it turns out that Wordpad saved it in UTF-16.

4. When I cut and paste from Firefox into Notepad,  the UTF-8 characters
display correctly (and the font is Courier throughout).

4a. Notepad by default offers to save the file in ASCII-only. When I
tell Notepad to save as UTF-8, the resulting file displays correctly
with Wordpad, Notepad and Firefox/UTF-8.

Thus, using the least proprietary tools I have available on XP,
there only seems to be one path that saves a genuine UTF-8 file:
cut and paste from Firefox into Notepad, and then save as UTF-8.
The other paths I tried result in non-UTF-8 files.

5. I then mailed the good UTF-8 file to myself as an attachment,
from a gmail account to a university account. It survived the trip.

6. Just for fun, I ran it through idnits.

** There are 5 instances of lines with non-ascii characters in the document.

** There is 1 instance of too long lines in the document, the longest one
   being 2 characters in excess of 72.

The second warning is interesting - how do you compute the line length when
there are non-Latin characters around?

     Brian