utf8 cipher text

[Werner Koch]

On 18 Sep 2002 08:12:51 -0500, Jacob Perkins said:

> Is encrypted text supposed to be utf8?  If not, what is the standard?

It is not specified.  Some claim that with *cleartext* signatures the
text should be utf-8 but for traditional reasons it is probably
Latin-1 or DOC-CP437.  "cleartext" signatures are anyway deprecated in
favor of PGP/MIME.

User IDs and readable notation data should be UTF-8.  There is problem
as well here: even PGP 7 seems to encode user IDs as Latin-1.  We have
to live with these wrong encodings and frontends may use an heuristic
approach to fix it.

Shalom-Salam,

   Werner