Aaron Crane - The Register

The 糞▯ Fonts Don't Work: A Practical Guide to Unicode on Unix

Getting Unix programs to deal with fonts, languages, and character sets in the way you want can seem unnecessarily complicated. This talk describes how to configure common Unix applications like Bash, Xterm, Vim, Emacs, and Mutt to handle text correctly in all its many and varied forms.

Along the way, it describes the nitty-gritty bits - character sets, encoding, Unicode, locales, and all the rest - in just enough detail for understanding what's going on and for diagnosing any problems that may occur.

While not directly aimed at programmers, this talk will also be helpful to anyone hacking on software which needs to handle text, especially on the internet.