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