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.
UnicodePrimer - multibyte_for_rails - Trac
Rails ‘show and tell’ talks · Fingertips
a presentation on why unicode support in rails
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
HowToUseUnicodeStrings in Ruby on Rails
Fun with Unicode - O'Reilly Ruby
#10935 (ActionMailer: charset is not set, if only one part is defined (e.g. attachment)) - Rails Trac - Trac
rails bug that messes up email charsets when sending multipart messages.
Thinking Sphinx in Arabic/Unicode | ExpressionLab
How do I replace accented Latin characters in Ruby? - Stack Overflow
Get Ruby 1.9, Rails, MySQL and UTF-8 to Work Together
Monkey patch the mysql gem to return UTF-8 encoded strings
ActiveSupport::Multibyte Updated · Fingertips
coverage of some ActiveSupport::Multibyte changes that happened back in 2008
Soapbox
interesting rant about ruby 1.9's encoding support. Most it it resonates strongly with my opinions.
Ruby 1.9 Encodings: A Primer and the Solution for Rails « Katz Got Your Tongue?
Another clear summary of the encoding mess of 1.9. With great power comes great ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
removing illegal bytes for encoding in ruby 1.9+ strings | Bibliographic Wilderness
Benchmarking ruby Unicode normalization alternatives | Bibliographic Wilderness
janlelis/uniscribe: Debug help for Unicode strings
gem install uniscribe
janlelis/unicode-x: Unicode Micro Libraries for Ruby