I created my first PR which is for the WDC65816S MPU, and I am not really sure what to do for the name of the PHI2 pin. I went ahead and used the Greek character but I noticed that the Commodore 6502 schematic uses a Dutch zero. Is there a convention or rule that I should be following?
Any unusual characters are likely to cause problems on somebodyās PC somewhere in the world. KiCad users are found everywhere
While the Ļ looks great, I suspect that @davidsrsb is correct and that āphiā would be a safer option.
If you still want it to look good, why not make it (or in your case keep because you already made it) right and use the Greek phi, Ļ. I donāt understand why anyone would use use a wrong character which would still be potentially as problematic as the correct one.
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UTF-8 and let the laggards catch up. 
Where to draw the line, classical Greek is not too controversial in the engineering community, but we might see odd modern accented European characters or Chinese.
More most people modifying a symbol not available on their local keyboard is a pain.
Basically, we do not have to draw any line, people shall use any character they want ā¦ and deal with the consequences. (āI could not open your fileā, āOh, my silkscreen is all mess upā, āthat pin has no designatorā etc.)
I do try to keep my characters in the 7-Bit ASCii and my file names without spaces and an shorter than 30 Characters, that means less hassle for me, because I am almost certain that it wont be the problem when dealing with my files, but that is because I prefer āno hassleā over āfancy charactersā/ācomplete novel in nameā, but that is just me, each to their own.
Me too 
i have to delete spam every few days on this forum, usually in Russian and for some bizarre reason Vietnamese.
If non ascii text becomes common in symbols and on pcbs and the spammers take advantage of this, it is going to cause a lot more checking of posts here.
Thanks a lot! I really havenāt seen but a couple of spam post in this forum, which means that you guys are doing a terrific job!
However I doubt that it is going to be an issue, there are much lower hanging fruits than the (relative) small electronics community.
Surely one of the regulars writing about ĀµF capacitors and kĪ© resistors, discussing why the transistor is running at 85Ā°C, comparing prices of fabs in ā¬, or even creating characters for silkscreens like ē”, shouldnāt trigger your spam detectors?
Also itās not like people are running Kicad on XP. All the platforms that Kicad runs on have been UTF-8 ready for years, ditto for programming languages like Python and Java.
No, but āŲØŲ§Śā is the Jawi script version of ābacaā, which means read in Malay
I have been doing a quick test and KiCad seems to handle UTF-8 well, I have not tested plugins and things like BOM exporting
Malaysia and Indonesia use romanised writing for everyday communications. Only religious writings and classical scholars use Jawi.
Strangely Jawi has been making a bit of a comeback in Malaysia, very annoying as I cannot read it much and it can be ambiguous - it lacks the vowel diacritics found in Arabic
Anyway lets get back to UTF-8 in KiCad and the plugins.
Are there any known UTF-8 failures in KiCad?
I remember there have been some related bugs lately, and itās of course possible thereās more. Letās not forget that KiCad has never been totally rewritten after early 90ās. In most cases unicode works, of course. And handling unicode is always problematic because when dealing with user input there still may be encoding/decoding problems, regardless of the application and system.
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