LE> Frankly, I think we should just go to Unicode. 

By Unicode I presume you mean UCS-2.  That would mean a new PKT file
format, of course.  It would also be highly inefficient for text that was
mostly ISO 8859-1, since every other byte would be zero.  (Although I do
wonder how much of that would be eliminated by ZIP, RAR, ARJ, ARC, and
suchlike.)

UTF-8 would be better.

 ¯ JdeBP ®

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