.DT
Encodings
Discworld concepts
Encodings
.SH Letters, digits, and how they're stored
.SP 5 5
The letters and digits you see on the screen are all stored internally in the server as numbers, 1s and 0s ultimately. For the geeky among you, the letter "A" is stored as the number 65, but "a" is stored as 97, in pretty much all modern standards, called "encodings". The standard English alphabet, digits and most common punctuation symbols are stored in a relatively small range, from 32 up to 127 (standardised as the ASCII encoding). Now, computers are much happier dealing in the range 0-255, which means that mud clients are free to use encodings that support a wider range of characters, including letters like ó, ä, æ, etc.
.EP
.SP 5 5
Until December 2006, the MUD didn't care which encoding was used; it simply accepted the characters it was sent (as numbers) and sent them back as they were received. This occasionally meant that some of you occasionally saw "´" in place of "'", e.g. "Wodan´s encoding was incompatible with mine."
.EP
.SH UTF-8
.SP 5 5
In December 2006, the MUD introduced UTF-8 support. UTF-8 is an encoding that is compatible with most other encodings for the standard English alphabet, digits and most common punctuation symbols, but supports a far wider range of characters. Unfortunately, these characters are supported in a way that is incompatible with non-UTF-8 encodings. This means that any text using interesting (non-ASCII) characters, including aliases, board posts, newspaper articles and finger information, will not display correctly in the MUD.
.EP
.SP 5 5
Newspaper articles have already been converted, en masse, but you may find that your finger information might not display correctly. Recreating the finger info after running "chenc" will correct this problem. Aliases with non-UTF-8 characters can be accessed or renamed using the "oldalias" command, which works similarly to the "alias" command, except that it automatically converts to and from UTF-8 where required for backward compatibility.
.EP
.SH See also
.SP 5 5
chenc, chfn, alias
.EP
