Hello Tony!

Thursday February 25 2016 21:24, Tony Langdon wrote to Maurice Kinal:

 MK>> That explains the BOM at the beginning of your actual text
 MK>> message just before, "-=> Maurice Kinal wrote to Tony Langdon
 MK>> <=-" on the first line.  I should have guessed given I've seen it
 MK>> used before in Fidonet and it did the exact same thing at the
 MK>> first byte of the actual, printable text message.

 TL> I don't know what a BOM is - it's not a bill of materials, or even a
 TL> bureau of meteorology! :)  I've never really dealt with the innards of
 TL> UTF-8. :)

Byte Order Mark.

 MK>> No doubt about that here.  I have yet to see any Fidonet app get
 MK>> it right other than ones that call up non-native editors such as
 MK>> you and I are doing.

 TL> Given that most Fidonet apps were written (and in many cases, last
 TL> updated) before UTF-8 came along, I'm not surprised! :)  Obviously,
 TL> calling up more moden third party editors works for some things. :)

It is unlikely that native UTF-8 support will be added to any existing FidoNet
software packages.  Most of them are either abandoned, closed-source, or both.
GoldED+ is open-source and still maintained, but needs a lot of work to support
UTF-8 correctly, especially since it is still used on OS's which do not support
UTF-8, such as DOS and OS/2.

Andrew

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