Is there a proper way to get Cyrillic working across the system

christooss · 2021-09-20 21:38:34

I'm trying to watch Russian series with Russian subtitles, but I always have problems with VLC not correctly showing them. Even latin characters such as čćžšđ are usually a problem.

One solution is to use MPV that correctly displays them but if I try opening this file in Gedit, VSCodium I get from anything from ?????? to Õîòèòå âû â ýòî âåðèòü as a replacement for Cyrillic fonts.
Same thing happens in terminal. This file doesn't "want" to be shown correctly. If I type or copy and paste random Russian text to editor, save it and display it, everything works.

I get that something is happening with wrong locale types of the file, but is there a way to not care about that and "help" applications to just work with across the system? Files currently have charset=iso-8859-1.

Thanks for the answers.

Last edited by christooss (2021-09-20 21:43:03)

seth · 2021-09-21 06:20:19

Files currently have charset=iso-8859-1

localectl
locale
locale -a

You should™ be using some UTF-8 variant and if the process blindly applies that to the text encoding (there's no way to reliably detect the "true" encoding of a plain text file) you'll get a utf-8 interpretation of iso8859 text.
Is the files encoding guessable at all?

file -b --mime-encoding /path/to/subtitle.srt

You can use

iconv -f iso8859-1 -t utf8 -o subtitle_utf8.srt subtitle.srt

to transcode iso8859-1 into utf8.
For vlc see https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_HowTo/Cha … _encoding/

Arch Linux

#1 2021-09-20 21:38:34

Is there a proper way to get Cyrillic working across the system

#2 2021-09-21 06:20:19

Re: Is there a proper way to get Cyrillic working across the system

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