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From: mouse@lightning.mcrcim.mcgill.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  Danish chars in X applications
Message-ID: <9103021947.AA07280@lightning.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Date: 2 Mar 91 19:47:17 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 35

> How should I configure X to display danish characters (ae, oslash,
> aring) in f.ex. xterm (more, vi, cat), emacs, etc?  Should I use
> xmodmap or translations, or possibly a combination of both?  I've
> tried using xmodmap, mapping keycode 93 (';' on suns) to keysym 'ae'
> etc., but the only program showing the danish characters is xev --
> not very useful.

I would guess that there is nothing whatever wrong with X.  You mention
three X clients: xterm, emacs, and xev.  Of these, only xterm and emacs
have trouble.

In the case of emacs, I assume it's a GNU emacs; that's the only one I
know of that runs in its own X window.  In this case, it's probably
because emacs simply does not understand 8-bit characters, either on
input or output.  I have hacked on the output code to deal with them
correctly, but I haven't touched the input code yet.  (I can send my
diffs out to anyone who's interested....)

In the case of xterm, you need to set things up correctly, or your
8-bit characters will have their high bit stripped before they get a
chance to do anything useful.  UTSLing leads me to believe that xterm
always passes them through to the pseudo-tty intact.  But you need to
persuade the pseudo-tty to preserve the high bit.  How you do this
depends on your OS; if you have a Berkeley-style tty interface you
might try `stty pass8'.

Then there is the problem of the application.  more, vi, cat, etc may
or may not strip off the high bit for you.  (cat probably doesn't; it's
used for binary files too often.)  This too depends on your operating
system vendor and version.

					der Mouse

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