less and LESSCHARSET=latin1 and scandinavian chars are &

[Gordon Messmer]

Jani Ollikainen wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 05:54:18PM -0800, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> 
>>Your LANG should probably be set to fi_FI.UTF-8.  Once you fix it, 
>>you'll have to log out and probably restart gdm to get your X session in 
>> a UTF-8 locale.
> 
> Why would I want to use my machine in finnish language?

My fault.  I assumed that's what you wanted based on your LC_CTYPE, etc. 
  If you want english, then it should be set to en_US.UTF-8, as in the 
default.

> Hate those 
> translations, and i don't think that utf-8 is here atm.

And why do you think that?  Based on your own experience, I'd say that 
locale-specific encodings are "here" atm.  UTF-8 is the one true path.

> But this conversation is getting so much of topic

I think it's very much on topic.  If there is any reason why UTF-8 
should not be used, then it should be fixed.  UTF-8 is the default, and 
will be the default character encoding for all future releases of the 
distribution.  Right?

> , i got it working
> but i don't understand the logic why it works w/o lesscharset env,

Less was probably converting the characters to something it thought 
would display, and your terminal was interpreting them as an unknown 
encoding.  This is exactly why UTF-8 is the default.  It's the only 
viable way to reliably encode character data and have it display right 
under any locale (as long as it's a UTF-8 locale).