Re: [tlug] Japanese Encoding - which one?

[Dave Gutteridge <dave@example.com>]

Lyle,

	I think I might be in a good position to offer advice. I'm a long time
HTML designer, constantly struggling with other people's encoding
choices, and also a recent convert to Linux, and so I went through some
similar issues that you are describing.

> Between Bluefish and 
> vim though, which is better for pages with half text and half photos?

Personally, I use Quanta. It's designed for KDE, but it runs under
Gnome, no problem.
None of the software mentioned here does WYSIWYG editing, so it really
doesn't matter whether you have photos or not, or what the content is.
They all just have pretty ways of formatting the source code so it's
easier to read. Well, that's a simplification, but still, the point is
that the content of your pages, and whether or not it has photos, won't
really find much advantage in any of these programs.

> Will it be possible to convert the older pages to UTF-8 or will they 
> have to be redone from a blank page?

It is possible to convert encodings. In a situation like yours where the
encodings have become a bit confused, it usually involves some fancy
copying and pasting.

In a similar situation, I found this worked:
Copy the text from the page where it displays correctly. Directly from
the browser window, for example.
Copy the text into a new document in a word processor. I recommend
OpenOffice Writer.
Save the document as encoded text, selecting utf-8 as your encoding
type.
Now you have the text in a simple text file with the right encoding.
Take your original HTML files and change the DOCTYPE encoding to UTF-8.
When you save this change, your Japanese text will almost certainly all
go wonky.
But, all you have to do it copy the text from your recently saved text
files back into the HTML.
The downside is that this can be tedious if there are lots of tags,
pages, and tricky layouts.
The upside is that this preserves the original text without having to
rewrite it. Good if you're dealing with lots of text.

I hope that helps.

--
Dave M G