New symbols like the Euro are being invented. If users adopt this standard, they have documents in different character sets on their disk, and they start having to think about it daily. But computers should make things simpler, not more complicated. The solution of this problem is the adoption of a world-wide usable character set. The use of 1 byte to represent 1 character is, however, an accident of history, caused by the fact that computer development started in Europe and the U.S. where 96 characters were found to be sufficient for a long time.
Every character is represented as two bytes.
This encoding can only represent the first 65536 Unicode characters. This is an extension of UCS-2 which can represent 1112064 Unicode characters. The first 65536 Unicode characters are represented as two bytes, the other ones as four bytes. Every character is represented as four bytes. In the following, we will describe how to change your Linux system so it uses UTF-8 as text encoding.