DOCUMENT ID: 1512-02

SYNOPSIS:    Using International Characters with Solaris

OS RELEASE:  2.x

PRODUCT:     Solaris

KEYWORDS:    international europe latin i18n


DESCRIPTION: 

How to enable latin character support.


SOLUTION:

Solaris supports the ISO-8859 ISO standard for Latin characters.  The
ISO-8859 standard specifies an 8-bit character set standard that
includes characters for all Latin-based languages. 

From OpenWindows, the ISO-8859 characters can be used with any font set
that supports them.  It is possible to see a list of these fonts by
running xlsfonts.  These fonts all end with the characters -iso8859-1. 

In general, the fonts that can be selected by setting OpenWin properties
will have this support.  To type a special character such as an accented
character, first press and hold down the COMPOSE key while pressing a
key that corresponds to the desired accent mark.  Then release the
COMPOSE key and type the letter over which the accent mark should
appear. 

For some applications, such as the vi editor, it is also necessary to
set the environment variable LC_CTYPE to the value iso-8859-1.  This can
be done while running csh by typing:

  setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1

The setenv should be added to the ~/.cshrc file.  For sh or ksh, edit
the ~/.profile file to have the lines:

  LC_CTYPE = iso_8859_1
  export LC_CTYPE
  
Solaris 2.4 generally strips characters to 7 bits.  To prevent this, and
allow 8-bit characters to appear on a terminal, use the "stty" command. 
To allow 8-bit characters, type:

  stty -istrip

The one accent character that does not appear on the english keyboard is
the umlaut.  To place an umlaut over a letter, press and hold the
COMPOSE key while typing a double-quote ("), then release the COMPOSE
key and type the letter over which the umlaut should appear. 


DATE APPROVED: 09/05/95