[SWLUG] non ascii characters etc.

[Dafydd Harries]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 05:23:11PM +0100, Gareth Lewis wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> ok I know this has been a topic before but I'm trying to improve my  welsh e-mails by actually getting ^ accents above vowels.  
> 
> do people get this character as an o with a hat  ????????  ?

I did eventually, once i'd switched my terminal from UTF-8 to Latin1 and
worked out that mutt was refusing to show them for some reason. If you
want to use all the Welsh accented characters, you'll need to use either
8859-14 (Latin8) or a Unicode encoding (probably UTF-8). It probably
depends who you want to send the emails to, since they'll need to have
the same encoding as you for things to work. Sometimes it's easier to
cheat and use latin-1 since just about everyone can read it and it has
most of the accents.

See if you can read this:
o-hat in latin-8: ô
w-hat in latin-8: ð
o-hat in utf-8:   ô
w-hat in utf-8:   ŵ

You might well be able to see the latin-8 o-hat right away, but the
others will probably take more fiddling. And you won't be able to view
the latin-8 ones and the utf-8 ones at the same time.

Once you've worked out what encoding you want to use and whether your
mail program / editor / operating system / toolkit / desktop environment
support it, you have to make sure you have appropriate fonts
installed.

> I got that from a cut and paste from IE into groupwise (all on nt4, boo!).
> 
> does anyone know if i can do an alt numeric-keypad thingy for these characters ? 
> 
> they seem to be part of iso-8859-14 for celtic languages, but could be available elsewhere.

XFree has ways of inputting these characters. On this computer right
now, with XFree 4.3.0, I can press "Shift+AltGr w ^" and get a w-hat.
Alternatively, my editor, vim, lets me do the same thing with "Control-k
w >". There are ways of remapping keys in various places to change
things. You can also use something like the GNOME character palette or a
character map for copying and pasting, though this is a little more
laborious.

-- 
Dafydd