Description

This article is from the Nordic countries FAQ, by Antti Lahelma and Johan Olofsson, with numerous contributions by others.

1.8.4 How do I set up support for 8-bit ISO-8859-1 representation? (æøåäö, ÆØÅÄÖ)

The ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) set is currently the most common character
representation standard on soc.culture.nordic, and is also quite
frequent in e.g. soc.culture.german, personal e-mail etc. However, on
many systems, the ability to view these characters is not provided as
"default", so you may need to configure some things on your own.

* If you are reading news through a modem, you need to make sure
that your modem connection is 8 data bits. (The most common
parameters are "8N1" - 8 data bits, no parity bits, and one stop
bit).
* For DOS text mode communication programs, you need a ISO->IBM
translation table. Tables for Telemate, Telix and Procomm Plus can
be found in the file "xlate.zip", available at various FTP sites.
* For MS Windows ® communication programs, select an ANSI or
ISO-Latin-1 font. For MS-Kermit, use "set term char latin". For
Procomm Plus for Windows, select vt220 or vt320 emulation. Be sure
that bit 8 is not stripped.
* For MS Windows ® you can also generate 8-bit characters globally
by choosing "US-International" keyboard layout via the
"International" dialogue box in the Control Panel. For instance,
'ä' (a diaeresis) is generated by pressing "a, i.e. double quote
followed by lowercase a.
A note to Windows programmers: Let the underlying keyboard
drivers, run-time libararies etc. take care of keyboard input.
Only be sure that the 8th bit is not stripped/masked away.
* If your newsreader is UNIX-based, insert the following command in
your .login or .profile file:

stty -istrip pass8

* If your modem connection is 7 bits (and cannot be changed to 8
bits), you can have ISO-Latin-1 characters translated to "[\]{|}"
before they are sent over the modem. Pipe your reader through the
"tr" command, similar to above:

tr '\306\330\305\304\326\346\370\345\344\366'
'[\\][\\{|}{|'

* If you use the "emacs" editor, version 19.x, and have a
ISO-Latin-1 display font, insert the following line in your .emacs
file:

(standard-display-european t)

Also, if you have a keyboard with international characters that
you want to be able to use directly, or if you in another way are
able to generate 8-bit codes directly from your keyboard, insert
the following line:

(set-input-mode (car (current-input-mode))
(nth 1 (current-input-mode))
0)
Note that in cases where the Meta key is represented by setting the
8th (high) bit, (ie. if you are not using X-windows), this line
will disable the Meta key, so you will subsequently have to use
"ESC x" to generate "M-x".
Otherwise, insert the following line:

(load-library "iso-insert")

A new keymap, 8859-1, has now been assigned to the key sequence
"C-x 8". You can assign this to another sequence, e.g. C-t, by
inserting:

(global-set-key "\C-t" 8859-1-map)

Some strokes from this map:

        C-x 8 d   gives ð (eth)
        C-x 8 t   gives þ (thorn)
        C-x 8 a e gives æ (ae)
        C-x 8 / o gives ø (o-slash)
        C-x 8 a a gives å (a-ring)
        C-x 8 " a gives ä (a diaeresis)
        C-x 8 " o gives ö (o diaeresis)
        C-x 8 ' a gives á (a acute)
        C-x 8 ' i gives í (i acute)

Continue to:

• prev: 1.8.3 How do I set up support for 7-bit ISO-646 representation? ({|}, [\])
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• next: 1.8.5 References