♇ Pluto — a paranormal Unicode converter

One day, an apprentice came to me. “Master, Oh, Master,” said he, “some people on French IRC write in Unicode. Others, however, still use ISO 8859-1. Why does Luit not handle this case?” I told him that doing what he wanted would require paranormal powers to guess which encoding is being used.

♇ Pluto is a legacy encoding to Unicode converter, similar to Luit, that can be used to wrap any application so it can speak to a Unicode-only terminal. Unlike Luit, however, Pluto has paranormal powers, which it uses to work out which encoding is being used at a given moment.

The main differences between Pluto and Luit are:

• Pluto will detect the encoding being used at a given moment;
• Pluto only supports a small number of legacy encodings, while Luit can handle any ISO 2022-compliant encoding, and many that are not;
• Pluto is a standalone program, while Luit depends on much of the X server's internationalisation machinery;
• Pluto never translates keyboard input; it assumes that the application wants its input in Unicode.

The Pluto manual page.

Download Pluto.

Back to my software page.

Juliusz Chroboczek