XML Cleansing
When writing XML, all text should be converted to UTF8 if it's not coming from a known source. This blog post provides a ruby function to do the conversion.
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine.
UTF8 encoded text file
useful for testing compatability.
Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: December 6, 2004
contains instructions for setting up a "compose" key in xorg to allow unicode chars to be entered.
UFPDF: Unicode/UTF-8 extension for FPDF | Steven Wittens - Acko.net
SourceForge.net: TCPDF - PDF class for PHP
fork of fpdf that supports unicode
UnicodePrimer - multibyte_for_rails - Trac
ongoing · Characters vs. Bytes
Rails ‘show and tell’ talks · Fingertips
a presentation on why unicode support in rails
[cairo] PDF Text Extraction: Past and Present
Summary of font handling in the PDF spec
Adobe: ToUnicode Mapping File Tutorial
Working with UTF-8 in PDF::Writer and Ruby on Rails - Peter Krantz
summary: convert utf8 strings to ye olde shite encoding before passing them into pdf::writer
cairo - rcairo
ruby bindings for the gnome graphics library, including support for generating unicode PDFs
RubyForge: cairo: Project Info
rcairo page on rubyforge
Secure UTF-8 Input in Rails - igvita.com
don't trust incoming UTF-8 input in rails
davidflanagan.com: Nifty Unicode codepoints utility
define constants for unicode codepoints in ruby
Fun with unicode - Sara Golemon
patch for PHP that adds support for various unicode characters. Using the unicode skull and crossbones character as an alias for die() is a nice touch
Unicode fun on IRC
Turning MySQL data in latin1 to utf8 utf-8 - O'Reilly ONLamp Blog
Some wrong info, but a few useful commands as well
UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux
UTF8 History
HowToUseUnicodeStrings in Ruby on Rails
Text Processing in Python (a book)
useful for general advice on reading text files, not just from python. Also some good stuff on state machines and unicode
Fun with Unicode - O'Reilly Ruby
Tip #246 - Working with Unicode (the same, rewritten for legibility) : vim online
Tony Finch - no-longer-simple mail transport protocol
good overview of additions to the basic SMTP protocol. Explains header encoding, mime types, quoted printable, base64, etc
Apple's MacRoman character set and equivalent Unicode and HTML characters
RFC 3629 UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646
UTF-8: in RFC form!
Unicode: Index of /Public/MAPPINGS
Mappings from a wide range of encodings into Unicode
Miscellaneous Symbols - Test for Unicode support in Web browsers