man 7 ascii confusion
Manpages version 3.44-0ubuntu1 distribution Linux Mint 15.
In man 7 ascii, there is the following sentence:
Quoted 2 lines
Many 8-bit codes (such as ISO 8859-1, the Linux default character set) contain ASCII as their lower half.
Locales now use UTF-8 by default. This sentence should probably be changed to something explaining how UTF-8 works, like:
Quoted 3 lines
Many 8-bit codes contain ASCII as their lower half. The Linux default character set, UTF-8, fits thousands of characters through non-ASCII characters using more than one upper-half byte.
Or something like that, I'm no expert.
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Duncan de Wet -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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Hello Duncan,
Quoted 7 lines · Duncan de Wet
Manpages version 3.44-0ubuntu1 distribution Linux Mint 15.
In man 7 ascii, there is the following sentence:
Quoted 2 lines
Many 8-bit codes (such as ISO 8859-1, the Linux default character set) contain ASCII as their lower half.
Quoted 8 lines
Locales now use UTF-8 by default. This sentence should probably be changed to something explaining how UTF-8 works, like:
Quoted 3 lines
Many 8-bit codes contain ASCII as their lower half. The Linux default character set, UTF-8, fits thousands of characters through non-ASCII characters using more than one upper-half byte.
Or something like that, I'm no expert.
I agree that something should be fixed, but simplest I think is to remove mention of 8859-1 as the default. There is already a utf-8(7) page that explains UTF-8 at some length.
I applied the patch below, and I'll also add utf-8(7) under SEE ALSO.
Cheers,
Michael
man7/ascii.7 +0 -0
@@ -38,8 +38,7 @@ ascii \- ASCII character set encoded in octal,
decimal, and hexadecimal
.SH DESCRIPTION
ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a 7-bit code.
-Many 8-bit codes (such as ISO 8859-1, the
-Linux default character set) contain ASCII as their lower half. +Many 8-bit codes (e.g., ISO 8859-1) contain ASCII as their lower half.
The international counterpart of ASCII is known as ISO 646. .LP
The following table contains the 128 ASCII characters.
Signature · 7 lines
Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html