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+<chapter id="unicode">
+<chapterinfo>
+ <author>
+ <firstname>Jelmer</firstname><surname>Vernooij</surname>
+ <affiliate>
+ <orgname>Samba Team</orgname>
+ <address><email>jelmer@samba.org</email></address>
+ </affiliate>
+ </author>
+ <pubdate>25 March 2003</pubdate>
+</chapterinfo>
+
+<title>Unicode/Charsets</title>
+
+<sect1>
+<title>What are charsets and unicode?</title>
+
+<para>
+Computers communicate in numbers. In texts, each number will be
+translated to a corresponding letter. The meaning that will be assigned
+to a certain number depends on the <emphasize>character set(charset)
+</emphasize> that is used.
+A charset can be seen as a table that is used to translate numbers to
+letters. Not all computers use the same charset (there are charsets
+with German umlauts, Japanese characters, etc). Usually a charset contains
+256 characters, which means that storing a character with it takes
+exactly one byte. </para>
+
+<para>
+There are also charsets that support even more characters,
+but those need twice(or even more) as much storage space. These
+charsets can contain <command>256 * 256 = 65536</command> characters, which
+is more then all possible characters one could think of. They are called
+multibyte charsets (because they use more then one byte to
+store one character).
+</para>
+
+<para>
+A standardised multibyte charset is unicode, info available at
+<ulink url="http://www.unicode.org/">www.unicode.org</ulink>.
+Big advantage of using a multibyte charset is that you only need one; no
+need to make sure two computers use the same charset when they are
+communicating.
+</para>
+
+<para>Old windows clients used to use single-byte charsets, named
+'codepages' by microsoft. However, there is no support for
+negotiating the charset to be used in the smb protocol. Thus, you
+have to make sure you are using the same charset when talking to an old client.
+Newer clients (Windows NT, 2K, XP) talk unicode over the wire.
+</para>
+</sect1>
+
+<sect1>
+<title>Samba and charsets</title>
+
+<para>
+As of samba 3.0, samba can (and will) talk unicode over the wire. Internally,
+samba knows of three kinds of character sets:
+</para>
+
+<variablelist>
+ <varlistentry>
+ <term>unix charset</term>
+ <listitem><para>
+ This is the charset used internally by your operating system.
+ The default is <emphasize>ASCII</emphasize>, which is fine for most
+ systems.
+ </para></listitem>
+ </varlistentry>
+
+ <varlistentry>
+ <term>display charset</term>
+ <listitem><para>This is the charset samba will use to print messages
+ on your screen. It should generally be the same as the <command>unix charset</command>.
+ </para></listitem>
+ </varlistentry>
+
+ <varlistentry>
+ <term>dos charset</term>
+ <listitem><para>This is the charset samba uses when communicating with
+ DOS and Windows 9x clients. It will talk unicode to all newer clients.
+ The default depends on the charsets you have installed on your system.
+ Run <command>testparm -v | grep "dos charset"</command> to see
+ what the default is on your system.
+ </para></listitem>
+ </varlistentry>
+</variablelist>
+
+<para>
+
+</sect1>
+</chapter>