apart from that, i think that there is a distinction between i18n (translating the software) and allowing non-ascii characters.
UTF-8 would be nice (if it worked!)
what do you mean exactly by "if it worked" ?
i am not sure this is a related issue but tcl/tk does not allow displaying unicode characters by default on macosx platforms. However there is a workaround for mac which works with tcl/tk8.4.9 (at least):
[from MACTCL mailing list]:
Unicode doesn't work satifactorily with the QuickDraw API used in the current Tk source. I wrote a patch for using ATSU instead, see http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=12997&atid=312997&func=detail&aid= 638966. This implementation is slower than the QuickDraw based stuff in some situations, so I am working on optimizations, before this can go into CVS. Unfortunately, optimizing and testing is going slow and I can only devote limited time to it. benny.
For my part, i would be quite satisfied if one could just write/save comments in pd patches in utf8 or latin1 encodings.
greetings, vincent