3. Display and application setup

In general applications need to be compiled as "8-bit-clean" to work well with European charaters. Actually they often need a few extra hints to get it right. You are advised to define the environment variable LC_CTYPE to iso_8859_1 right away. You should put this definition both in /etc/profile (for bash users) and also in /etc/csh.cshrc (for tcsh users.) Similarly you should (for the sake of principle) put something like this in your .Xdefaults or .Xresources file:

*basicLocale:   C
*timeFormat:    C
*numeric:       C
*displayLang:   iso_8859_1
*inputLang:     iso_8859_1

3.1 International character sets in specific applications

A number of applications demand special attention. This section describes how to set up configuration files for them.

bash v.1.13+ :

Put the following in your /etc/inputrc or your ~/.inputrc file

set meta-flag on
set convert-meta off
set output-meta on

tcsh :

Put the following in your /etc/csh.cshrc or .tcshrc file

setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1
stty pass8

Note: If this doesn't work your copy of tcsh was probably not compiled with NLS support or possibly it's version 6.03 or lower.

ls :

Issue the command as

ls -N

or possibly

ls --8bit

less :

Set the following environment variable

LESSCHARSET=latin1

elm :

Set the following environment variables

LANG=C
LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1

Some versions of elm require that your put the following definitions in your ~/.elm/elmrc/ file:

charset = iso-8859-1
displaycharset = iso-8859-1
textencoding = 8bit

telnet :

Put the following line in your ~/.telnetrc file

set binary true

kermit :

This is as close as I can get, but not completely satisfying yet: Put the following in your ~/.emacs file

set terminal bytesize 8
set command bytesize 8
set file bytesize 8
set language danish
set file character-set latin1-iso
set transfer character-set latin1-iso
set terminal character-set latin1-iso

I think there are more variables to set, but they are hiding. You would have to modify these settings if the remote system is DOS or OS/2 based.

emacs :

In version 19.26 or later of GNU emacs you can simply set the environment variable LC_CTYPE to iso_8859_1 like you do for tcsh and elm. If you use an older version put the following in your .emacs or the /usr/lib/emacs/site-lisp/default.el file:

(standard-display-european t)

(set-input-mode (car (current-input-mode))
        (nth 1 (current-input-mode))
        0) 

Dead key functionality should work under GNU emacs provided you use GNU emacs v19.30 or higher and XFree86 v3.1.2 or higher, so don't start researching available elisp packages implementing "electric keys" or anything like that. If you want to implement European keyboard conventions in emacs without upgrading the best choice is probably the remap package available from the AUC FTP server (see section References and FTP sites.)

ispell - Spell checking in Danish :

First make sure you install version 3.1 instead of version 4.0 of ispell. The latter is obsolete and multiply brain-damaged. You can download the sources for ispell at the GNU archive at prep.ai.mit.edu, and you can get a Danish dictionary via FTP from ftp.iesd.auc.dk in /pub/packages/dkispell/. Follow the compilation instructions and you should have no trouble (One caveat: When defining the variables necessary for compilation you should slightly confusingly tell ispell that Linux is a Sys V type OS by defining the variable USG.)

(Note for non-Danish readers: You can find dictionaries for most Western languages by reading the file Where included with the sources for ispell.)

TeX/LaTeX :

There are several problems with TeX/LaTeX: You want LaTeX to understand the special characters, and you also want the output to follow Danish conventions and so forth.

Under LaTeX2e the header should look something like this:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{a4}
\usepackage{isolatin1}
\usepackage[danish]{babel}

The first usepackage statement obviously sets the paper size to A4. The second makes sure LaTeX will interpret European characters correctly, so that you don't have to use pesky escape codes for European characters. These two packages are likely to be included in your TeX distribution. The last usepackage statement implements a range of standards for use in a Danish text. This last bit is tricky because it will most likely not have been built into your version of LaTeX and you'll need to do this yourself.

You will need some Danish hyphenation patterns (Dansk: orddeling) These are available at ftp://ftp.iesd.auc.dk/pub/packages/. The files you need are dkhyphen.tex, dkcommon.tex and dkspecial.tex. If you use the teTeX distribution (distributed with e.g. RedHat) you already have the relevant files. Essentially you need to put these into the directory containing international hyphenation patterns, edit the appropriate language dependency file (usually called language.dat) and finally rebuild LaTeX with initex. Before you do anything rash please make sure you know what files you are changing and back them up in advance.

Below is a procedure for enabling danish hyphenation. If it looks vague it's because TeX/LaTeX installations differ very much in their choice of path-names.

1. Find out where you have the hyphenation patterns. Under N-TeX this is /usr/lib/texmf/tex/hyphenation/, under teTeX it's /usr/lib/texmf/texmf/tex/generic/hyphen/. Try issuing a command find /usr/lib/ -iname '*hyph*' if you can't find the directory.
2. Check if the hyphenation patterns are already there. If not put the hyphenation patterns mentioned above in this directory.
3. Edit the file (probably) called language.dat. In the teTeX distribution you can just uncomment the appropriate line. If you downloaded the hyphenation pattern insert a line reading

   danish dkhyphen.tex
   

   If you have difficulty finding language.dat try issuing the command find /usr/lib/ -name language.dat
4. Back up the file latex.fmt. It could be in a variety of places. Use find /usr/lib/ -name latex.fmt to find it.
5. Change to the directory where you found latex.fmt. Issue the command initex latex.ltx. Pray. If everything went well you now have a new version of latex.fmt.
6. You can now use

   \usepackage[danish]{babel}
   

   in your LaTeX headers. Hyphenation should now be reasonably correct, quotation marks follow Danish conventions and chapters are now called "Kapitel" instead of "Chapter" etc.

If you use N-TeX you will have a configuration script called ntm-ltx.cfg located in /usr/lib/texmf/tools/. In that case simply put the hyphenation patterns in the the relevant directory (most likely called /usr/lib/texmf/tex/hyphenation/) and run the script. It will the prompt you to do the various steps described above.

(Note for non-Danish readers: The process is similar for other Western European languages, and the necessary files are mostly included by default. Simply executing the command /usr/lib/texmf/tools/ntm-ltx.cfg and following the instructions will be enough for almost all major Western languages.)

In LaTeX 2.09, use

\documentstyle[a4,isolatin]{article}

to include support for ISO latin1 characters and European paper-sizes.

isolatin.sty is available from all DANTE (see servers and from URL ftp://ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at/pub/8bit. It should also be included in the standard Linux distributions.

Note: Some people prefer using emacs in a special mode which translates "special" letters into TeX escape codes, but this method should be obsolete by now.

3.2 What characters you can display under Linux

Type dumpkeys -l | less at the prompt to find out what is readily available. You can map them to your keyboard via the keymap files mentioned in section loading a keytable.

0 X11R5 Note: The dead keys don't get the correct names under X11R5 with this scheme. Generally

dead_* (under plain Linux) => D* or D*_accent (under X11R5)

3.3 Loading the Latin-1 character set on the console

Execute the following commands under the bash shell:

setfont /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/lat1-16.psf
mapscrn /usr/lib/kbd/consoletrans/trivial
echo -ne '\033(K'

Note: This only has effect under plain Linux on the console.