Gentoo Linux Documentation -- Using UTF-8 with Gentoo This guide shows you how to set up and use the UTF-8 Unicode character set with your Gentoo Linux system, after explaining the benefits of Unicode and more specifically UTF-8. Computers do not understand text themselves. Instead, every character is represented by a number. Traditionally, each set of numbers used to represent alphabets and characters (known as a coding system, encoding or character set) was limited in size due to limitations in computer hardware. in Computing > Linux > Howtowith charactercomputercomputinggentooguidehowtolinuxshowstutorialunicodeutf-8by 2 users