From: smr@hitkw14.pki-nbg.philips.de (S.Riehm)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Extended chars in Unix
Date: 4 Sep 92 12:55:30 GMT

sbarnhar@ncratl.AtlantaGA.NCR.COM (Scott Barnhart) writes:

>I am using Unix SystemVR4, and want to find a way to generate the
>extended ASCII chars from the keyboard.  The reason for this is
>to generate the appropriate foreign characters (such as the vowels 
>with the accents, etc) needed in the various different languages 
>(specifically French, German and other European languages).

>I first thought it could be done somehow with the LOCALE stuff
>in Unix, setlocale(), chrtbl(), etc.  But the man pages don't go
>into how to generate or translate these characters.

The only IMPORTANT thing that I found about this stuff is that you
MUST have 8-bit clean programs. For example, I use Xterms, so I had to
set the eightBitInput and eightBitOutput resources ( although I think
they are default ), then its a matter of using Meta or Alt keys to set
the eighth bit, which in turn gives you these weird characters. In my
set up, an alt-k gives an e with umlauts ( two little dots ), the
combinations are pretty cryptic, but I got around that by setting up
translation tables for xterms, ( read the manual for them.. or ask for
a listing... I'll post it if I get > 3 requests ). So I now use a
compose sequence, compose + " + e = ALT-K for example. What you are
supposed to do at a dumb terminal without Alt keys, I have no idea..
get your boss to buy you a new terminal! :-)

This gets the input side of thing working, you then need to make sure
that your output device can handle 8bit characters, for XWindows you
just set the default font to an ISO font or equivalent ( I am using
iso1.16 but I have no idea what it maps to, cus I can't find it in any
font.aliases files ). I also had to set the environment variable
LESSCHARSET=latin1 to get less to understand that an 'international'
character ( foreign sounds so..... US v's THEM'ish ) is not a control
character to be barfed at.

( fx: sarcasm on :xf )
see its really quite simple isn't it??
( fx: sarcasm off :xf )

( fx: flame thrower set to: Light Toast :xf )
Of course in a perfect world vendors would realise that
internationalisation is not a bad thing, and that the default
settings should be 'international character sets' friendly, then those
that only use the simple a-z characters got no problems, and everyone
in not-America, and all those corresponding with not-America would also have
no problems. ( I say not-America because its pretty difficult to type
a real pound sign, not a # but a # <- what goes after british
currency, using the 'standard' character set )

Am I really asking too much??
It only took me several days to set up international characters right,
and I still have a couple of bugs to get around, and I have had experience
at setting up Xwindows etc.. it wasn't difficult to do, just so
incomprehensibly interconnected and confusing, setting an environment
variable does nothing!

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen Riehm		Configuration Management	   _-_|\ 
smr@pki-nbg.philips.de	Philips Kommunikations Industrie  /     \
Work: +49 911 526 2975	N|rnberg, Germany		  \_.-.*/
Fax:  +49 911 526 2095	"I was there, now I am here!"	       v 
"My company speaks another language, I CAN'T speak on it's behalf"
PS: if you can't read the name of my city, you are not being
international enough! and it's YOUR problem.. not mine!