ohnielse@ltf.dth.dk (Ole Holm Nielsen) (11/16/90)
My original question: >With SunOS 4.1 and Type-4 keyboards we now can use international characters >due to the new 8-bit support. However, the use of this feature, which is >most interesting to Europeans and others as well, appears totally undocumented >in the SunOS 4.1 manual set. I have so far managed to figure out, that you >can enable keyboard input of 8-bit characters by "stty pass8". I have also >by trial and error learned that, for example, the keystroke sequence >Compose-a-e will give me a beautiful Danish letter. > >But WHY, oh why, is there no manual section describing how to enable the >Compose feature, and where is the complete table of Compose codes and >the extended 8-bit ASCII code table ? And what is the use of the features >documented in locale(5) ? And what are the keyboard layouts (images of the >keyboard, I mean) that you get by loading national key mappings with >loadkeys(1) ? After all, these trivial questions were all thoroughly >documented years ago on DEC systems, when the VT-220 terminals first >appeared on the market. Just check the manual that comes with any DEC >terminal ! The answer is that International Features are indeed documented, but you would very likely never locate it. Thanks to Bill Tuthill (tut@Eng.Sun.COM) and Guy Harris (guy@auspex.com) for their helping hands. Firstly, with Type-4 keyboards you can enter 8-bit characters, provided you add the following to your .login file, as documented in the SunOS 4.1 Release Manual, p. 69-70: stty pass8 setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1 (I think the "stty pass8" gave us trouble if put in the .cshrc, which is what the Sun manual claims you have to do). In this place in the Release manual, some 8-bit support stuff is discussed as well. Then you turn to the System Services Overview manual (in the Programmer's Overview / Utilities and Libraries binder), skim chapter 6 ("Native Language Application Support") and turn to the Appendices A (" ISO Latin 1 Character Set"), B ("U.S. and European Keyboard Layouts"), and C ("Compose Key and Floating Accent Key Sequences"). (NOTE: I didn't find any of these keywords in the manual Index nor the Global Index - Sun ought to fix that in the next print of the manuals). Hopefully this information suffices for entering any character from a Type-4 keyboard (I don't know what solutions are possible with other keyboards - maybe loadkeys(1) can be used ?). Finally, if you have a native-language keyboard, the curly and square brackets etc. are reached by means of the AltGraph key together with the label printed on the side of certain keycaps. The files in /usr/share/lib/keytables describe all details about various keyboard layouts, including AltGraph. With these features in place we have succeeded in making our 4.1 machines truly international. We have even gotten some recent mods to TeX 3.0 that allows Danish 8-bit characters to be processed correctly by, e.g., LaTeX, so we are quite happy now ! With best regards, Ole H. Nielsen Laboratory of Applied Physics, Building 307 Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark E-mail: OHNielsen@ltf.dth.dk Telephone: (+45) 42 88 24 88 ext. 3187 Telefax: (+45) 45 93 23 99