> I think I can be content, then, that shifting from NONE based
> connections to ASCII connections where I am using ISO-8859-1
> (Latin-1) and Windows-1252 is my best "half-way house" for the
> moment.

I don't know what you mean exactily with "ASCII". ASCII is a 7-bit
character set, which - for what you want to achieve - is even worse
than NONE.

A good step would be to lift everything to ISO8859_1 or WIN1252, this
will work perfect for all Western European languages, including
all flavors of English.

> Moving the application to Unicode will be a long term ambition I
> think.

Yes. This is not an easy step and you should get familiar with the
concepts of Unicode before you go that step.

> Correct me if I'm wrong but when this time comes I should be
> thinking of re-creating the DB with all columns which are currently
> NONE changed to UTF8, then datapumping everything across.?

Yes. Or work with shadow tables or whatever. Changing the
character set of a column on the fly is difficult, AFAIK.
Maybe the FF should think about sponsoring an ALTER CHARACTER SET
command ;-)

Regards

Stefan