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 <H2><A NAME="s12">12. How to make other programs work with non-ASCII chars</A></H2>

 <P>
 <!--
 non-ASCII characters, using
 -->
 <P>In the bad old days this used to be quite a hassle. Every separate
 program had to be convinced individually to leave your bits alone.
 Not that all is easy now, but recently a lot of gnu utilities have
 learned to react to <CODE>LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1</CODE> or <CODE>LC_CTYPE=iso-8859-1</CODE>.
 Try this first, and if it doesn't help look at the hints below.
 Note that in recent versions of libc the routine setlocale() only
 works if you have installed the locale files (e.g. in
 <CODE>/usr/lib/locale</CODE>).
 <P>NOTE! The above was written years ago. Today locale stuff is a bit different.
 Try the command <CODE>locale -a</CODE> to see which locales are available.
 Then use one of these locale names instead of the <CODE>iso_8859-1</CODE>
 mentioned above. For example, <CODE>LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.ISO-8859-1</CODE> or
 <CODE>LC_CTYPE=fr_FR@euro</CODE>.
 <P>NOTE! Some of the below may still be true. Most of it is outdated.
 (Please report on what is incorrect today, so that it can be deleted.)
 <P>First of all, the 8-th bit should survive the kernel input processing,
 so make sure to have <CODE>stty cs8 -istrip -parenb</CODE> set.
 <P>A. For <CODE>emacs</CODE> the details strongly depend on the version.
 The information below is for version 19.34. Put lines
 <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
 <PRE>
         (set-input-mode nil nil 1)
         (standard-display-european t)
         (require 'iso-syntax)
 </PRE>
 </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

 into your <CODE>$HOME/.emacs</CODE>.
 The first line (to be precise: the final 1)
 tells <CODE>emacs</CODE> not to discard the 8-th bit from input characters.
 The second line tells <CODE>emacs</CODE> not to display non-ASCII characters
 as octal escapes.
 The third line specifies the syntactic properties
 and case conversion table for the Latin-1 character set
 These last two lines are superfluous if you have something like
 <CODE>LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1</CODE> in your environment.
 (The variable may also be <CODE>LC_ALL</CODE> or even <CODE>LANG</CODE>.
 The value may be anything with a substring `88591' or `8859-1'
 or `8859_1'.)
 <P>This is a good start.
 On a terminal that cannot display non-ASCII ISO 8859-1 symbols,
 the command
 <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
 <PRE>
         (load-library "iso-ascii")
 </PRE>
 </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

 will cause accented characters to be displayed comme {,c}a.
 If your keymap does not make it easy to produce non-ASCII characters,
 then
 <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
 <PRE>
         (load-library "iso-transl")
 </PRE>
 </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

 will make the 2-character sequence Ctrl-X 8 a compose character,
 so that the 4-character sequence Ctrl-X 8 , c produces c-cedilla.
 Very inconvenient.
 <P>The command
 <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
 <PRE>
         (iso-accents-mode)
 </PRE>
 </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

 will toggle ISO-8859-1 accent mode, in which the six
 characters ', `, ", ^, ~, / are dead keys
 modifying the following symbol.
 Special combinations: ~c gives a c with cedilla,
 ~d gives an Icelandic eth, ~t gives an Icelandic thorn,
 "s gives German sharp s, /a gives a with ring,
 /e gives an a-e ligature, ~&lt; and ~&gt; give guillemots,
 ~! gives an inverted exclamation mark,
 ~? gives an inverted question mark, and '' gives an acute accent.
 This is the default mapping of accents.
 The variable <CODE>iso-languages</CODE> is a list of pairs (language name,
 accent mapping), and a non-default mapping can be selected using
 <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
 <PRE>
         (iso-accents-customize LANGUAGE)
 </PRE>
 </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

 Here LANGUAGE can be one of <CODE>"portuguese"</CODE>, <CODE>"irish"</CODE>,
 <CODE>"french"</CODE>, <CODE>"latin-2"</CODE>, <CODE>"latin-1"</CODE>.
 <P>Since the Linux default compose character is Ctrl-.
 it might be convenient to use that everywhere. Try
 <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
 <PRE>
         (load-library "iso-insert.el")
         (define-key global-map [?\C-.] 8859-1-map)
 </PRE>
 </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

 The latter line will not work under <CODE>xterm</CODE>, if you use <CODE>emacs -nw</CODE>,
 but in that case you can put
 <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
 <PRE>
         XTerm*VT100.Translations:       #override\n\
               Ctrl &lt;KeyPress> . : string("\0308")
 </PRE>
 </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

 in your <CODE>.Xresources</CODE>.)
 <P>B. For <CODE>less</CODE>, put <CODE>LESSCHARSET=latin1</CODE> in the environment.
 This is also what you need if you see <CODE>\255</CODE> or <CODE>&lt;AD&gt;</CODE>
 in <CODE>man</CODE> output: some versions of <CODE>less</CODE> will render the soft hyphen
 (octal 0255, hex 0xAD) this way when not given permission to output Latin-1.
 <P>C. For <CODE>ls</CODE>, give the option <CODE>-N</CODE>. (Probably you want to make an alias.)
 <P>D. For <CODE>bash</CODE> (version 1.13.*), put
 <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
 <PRE>
         set meta-flag on
         set convert-meta off
         set output-meta on
 </PRE>
 </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

 into your <CODE>$HOME/.inputrc</CODE>.
 <P>E. For <CODE>tcsh</CODE>, use
 <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
 <PRE>
         setenv LANG     en_US
         setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1
 </PRE>
 </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

 If you have nls on your system, then the corresponding routines are used.
 Otherwise <CODE>tcsh</CODE> will assume iso_8859_1, regardless of the values given to
 LANG and LC_CTYPE. See the section NATIVE LANGUAGE SYSTEM in tcsh(1).
 (The Danish HOWTO says: <CODE>setenv LC_CTYPE ISO-8859-1; stty pass8</CODE>)
 <P>F. For <CODE>flex</CODE>, give the option <CODE>-8</CODE> if the parser it generates must be
 able to handle 8-bit input. (Of course it must.)
 <P>G. For <CODE>elm</CODE>, set <CODE>displaycharset</CODE> to <CODE>ISO-8859-1</CODE>.
 (Danish HOWTO: <CODE>LANG=C</CODE> and <CODE>LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1</CODE>)
 <P>H. For programs using curses (such as <CODE>lynx</CODE>) David Sibley reports:
 The regular curses package uses the high-order bit for reverse video mode
 (see flag _STANDOUT defined in <CODE>/usr/include/curses.h</CODE>).  However,
 <CODE>ncurses</CODE> seems to be 8-bit clean and does display iso-latin-8859-1
 correctly.
 <P>I. For programs using <CODE>groff</CODE> (such as <CODE>man</CODE>), make sure to use
 <CODE>-Tlatin1</CODE> instead of <CODE>-Tascii</CODE>. Old versions of the program <CODE>man</CODE>
 also use <CODE>col</CODE>, and the next point also applies.
 <P>K. For <CODE>rlogin</CODE>, use option <CODE>-8</CODE>.
 <P>L. For <CODE>joe</CODE>,
 <CODE>metalab.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/apps/editors/joe-1.0.8-linux.tar.gz</CODE>
 is said to work after editing the configuration file. Someone else said:
 <CODE>joe</CODE>: Put the <CODE>-asis</CODE> option in <CODE>/isr/lib/joerc</CODE> in the
 first column.
 <P>M. For LaTeX: <CODE>\documentstyle[isolatin]{article}</CODE>.
 For LaTeX2e: <CODE>\documentclass{article}\usepackage{isolatin}</CODE>
 where <CODE>isolatin.sty</CODE> is available from
 <A HREF="ftp://ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at/pub/8bit">ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at/pub/8bit</A>.
 <P>A nice discussion on the topic of ISO-8859-1 and how to manage 8-bit
 characters is contained in the file <CODE>grasp.insa-lyon.fr:/pub/faq/fr/accents</CODE>
 (in French). Another fine discussion (in English) can be found in
 <A HREF="ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/comp.answers/internationalization/iso-8859-1-charset">rtfm.mit.edu:pub/usenet-by-group/comp.answers/internationalization/iso-8859-1-charset</A>.
 <P>If you need to fix a program that behaves badly with 8-bit characters,
 one thing to keep in mind is that if you have a signed char type then
 characters may be negative, and using them as an array index will fail.
 Several programs can be fixed by judiciously adding (unsigned char) casts.
 <P>
 <HR>
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	<TITLE>The Linux keyboard and console HOWTO: How to make other programs work with non-ASCII chars</TITLE>
	<LINK HREF="kbd.FAQ-13.html" REL=next>
	<LINK HREF="kbd.FAQ-11.html" REL=previous>
	<LINK HREF="kbd.FAQ.html#toc12" REL=contents>
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	<HR>
	<H2><A NAME="s12">12. How to make other programs work with non-ASCII chars</A></H2>

	<P>
	<!--
	non-ASCII characters, using
	-->
	<P>In the bad old days this used to be quite a hassle. Every separate
	program had to be convinced individually to leave your bits alone.
	Not that all is easy now, but recently a lot of gnu utilities have
	learned to react to <CODE>LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1</CODE> or <CODE>LC_CTYPE=iso-8859-1</CODE>.
	Try this first, and if it doesn't help look at the hints below.
	Note that in recent versions of libc the routine setlocale() only
	works if you have installed the locale files (e.g. in
	<CODE>/usr/lib/locale</CODE>).
	<P>NOTE! The above was written years ago. Today locale stuff is a bit different.
	Try the command <CODE>locale -a</CODE> to see which locales are available.
	Then use one of these locale names instead of the <CODE>iso_8859-1</CODE>
	mentioned above. For example, <CODE>LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.ISO-8859-1</CODE> or
	<CODE>LC_CTYPE=fr_FR@euro</CODE>.
	<P>NOTE! Some of the below may still be true. Most of it is outdated.
	(Please report on what is incorrect today, so that it can be deleted.)
	<P>First of all, the 8-th bit should survive the kernel input processing,
	so make sure to have <CODE>stty cs8 -istrip -parenb</CODE> set.
	<P>A. For <CODE>emacs</CODE> the details strongly depend on the version.
	The information below is for version 19.34. Put lines
	<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
	<PRE>
	(set-input-mode nil nil 1)
	(standard-display-european t)
	(require 'iso-syntax)
	</PRE>
	</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

	into your <CODE>$HOME/.emacs</CODE>.
	The first line (to be precise: the final 1)
	tells <CODE>emacs</CODE> not to discard the 8-th bit from input characters.
	The second line tells <CODE>emacs</CODE> not to display non-ASCII characters
	as octal escapes.
	The third line specifies the syntactic properties
	and case conversion table for the Latin-1 character set
	These last two lines are superfluous if you have something like
	<CODE>LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1</CODE> in your environment.
	(The variable may also be <CODE>LC_ALL</CODE> or even <CODE>LANG</CODE>.
	The value may be anything with a substring `88591' or `8859-1'
	or `8859_1'.)
	<P>This is a good start.
	On a terminal that cannot display non-ASCII ISO 8859-1 symbols,
	the command
	<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
	<PRE>
	(load-library "iso-ascii")
	</PRE>
	</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

	will cause accented characters to be displayed comme {,c}a.
	If your keymap does not make it easy to produce non-ASCII characters,
	then
	<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
	<PRE>
	(load-library "iso-transl")
	</PRE>
	</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

	will make the 2-character sequence Ctrl-X 8 a compose character,
	so that the 4-character sequence Ctrl-X 8 , c produces c-cedilla.
	Very inconvenient.
	<P>The command
	<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
	<PRE>
	(iso-accents-mode)
	</PRE>
	</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

	will toggle ISO-8859-1 accent mode, in which the six
	characters ', `, ", ^, ~, / are dead keys
	modifying the following symbol.
	Special combinations: ~c gives a c with cedilla,
	~d gives an Icelandic eth, ~t gives an Icelandic thorn,
	"s gives German sharp s, /a gives a with ring,
	/e gives an a-e ligature, ~< and ~> give guillemots,
	~! gives an inverted exclamation mark,
	~? gives an inverted question mark, and '' gives an acute accent.
	This is the default mapping of accents.
	The variable <CODE>iso-languages</CODE> is a list of pairs (language name,
	accent mapping), and a non-default mapping can be selected using
	<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
	<PRE>
	(iso-accents-customize LANGUAGE)
	</PRE>
	</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

	Here LANGUAGE can be one of <CODE>"portuguese"</CODE>, <CODE>"irish"</CODE>,
	<CODE>"french"</CODE>, <CODE>"latin-2"</CODE>, <CODE>"latin-1"</CODE>.
	<P>Since the Linux default compose character is Ctrl-.
	it might be convenient to use that everywhere. Try
	<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
	<PRE>
	(load-library "iso-insert.el")
	(define-key global-map [?\C-.] 8859-1-map)
	</PRE>
	</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

	The latter line will not work under <CODE>xterm</CODE>, if you use <CODE>emacs -nw</CODE>,
	but in that case you can put
	<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
	<PRE>
	XTerm*VT100.Translations: #override\n\
	Ctrl <KeyPress> . : string("\0308")
	</PRE>
	</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

	in your <CODE>.Xresources</CODE>.)
	<P>B. For <CODE>less</CODE>, put <CODE>LESSCHARSET=latin1</CODE> in the environment.
	This is also what you need if you see <CODE>\255</CODE> or <CODE><AD></CODE>
	in <CODE>man</CODE> output: some versions of <CODE>less</CODE> will render the soft hyphen
	(octal 0255, hex 0xAD) this way when not given permission to output Latin-1.
	<P>C. For <CODE>ls</CODE>, give the option <CODE>-N</CODE>. (Probably you want to make an alias.)
	<P>D. For <CODE>bash</CODE> (version 1.13.*), put
	<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
	<PRE>
	set meta-flag on
	set convert-meta off
	set output-meta on
	</PRE>
	</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

	into your <CODE>$HOME/.inputrc</CODE>.
	<P>E. For <CODE>tcsh</CODE>, use
	<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
	<PRE>
	setenv LANG en_US
	setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1
	</PRE>
	</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

	If you have nls on your system, then the corresponding routines are used.
	Otherwise <CODE>tcsh</CODE> will assume iso_8859_1, regardless of the values given to
	LANG and LC_CTYPE. See the section NATIVE LANGUAGE SYSTEM in tcsh(1).
	(The Danish HOWTO says: <CODE>setenv LC_CTYPE ISO-8859-1; stty pass8</CODE>)
	<P>F. For <CODE>flex</CODE>, give the option <CODE>-8</CODE> if the parser it generates must be
	able to handle 8-bit input. (Of course it must.)
	<P>G. For <CODE>elm</CODE>, set <CODE>displaycharset</CODE> to <CODE>ISO-8859-1</CODE>.
	(Danish HOWTO: <CODE>LANG=C</CODE> and <CODE>LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1</CODE>)
	<P>H. For programs using curses (such as <CODE>lynx</CODE>) David Sibley reports:
	The regular curses package uses the high-order bit for reverse video mode
	(see flag _STANDOUT defined in <CODE>/usr/include/curses.h</CODE>). However,
	<CODE>ncurses</CODE> seems to be 8-bit clean and does display iso-latin-8859-1
	correctly.
	<P>I. For programs using <CODE>groff</CODE> (such as <CODE>man</CODE>), make sure to use
	<CODE>-Tlatin1</CODE> instead of <CODE>-Tascii</CODE>. Old versions of the program <CODE>man</CODE>
	also use <CODE>col</CODE>, and the next point also applies.
	<P>K. For <CODE>rlogin</CODE>, use option <CODE>-8</CODE>.
	<P>L. For <CODE>joe</CODE>,
	<CODE>metalab.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/apps/editors/joe-1.0.8-linux.tar.gz</CODE>
	is said to work after editing the configuration file. Someone else said:
	<CODE>joe</CODE>: Put the <CODE>-asis</CODE> option in <CODE>/isr/lib/joerc</CODE> in the
	first column.
	<P>M. For LaTeX: <CODE>\documentstyle[isolatin]{article}</CODE>.
	For LaTeX2e: <CODE>\documentclass{article}\usepackage{isolatin}</CODE>
	where <CODE>isolatin.sty</CODE> is available from
	<A HREF="ftp://ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at/pub/8bit">ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at/pub/8bit</A>.
	<P>A nice discussion on the topic of ISO-8859-1 and how to manage 8-bit
	characters is contained in the file <CODE>grasp.insa-lyon.fr:/pub/faq/fr/accents</CODE>
	(in French). Another fine discussion (in English) can be found in
	<A HREF="ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/comp.answers/internationalization/iso-8859-1-charset">rtfm.mit.edu:pub/usenet-by-group/comp.answers/internationalization/iso-8859-1-charset</A>.
	<P>If you need to fix a program that behaves badly with 8-bit characters,
	one thing to keep in mind is that if you have a signed char type then
	characters may be negative, and using them as an array index will fail.
	Several programs can be fixed by judiciously adding (unsigned char) casts.
	<P>
	<HR>
	<A HREF="kbd.FAQ-13.html">Next</A>
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