On 10/28/2009 09:10 AM Alfred von Campe wrote:
On Oct 27, 2009, at 19:28, ken wrote:
E.g., create a file with vi with just one German/Greek/French word, say, Έντελέχεια (Entylecheia, an ancient Greek word). If the name of the file is "nonenglish", then, after you do your save in vim, run the shell commands
touch temp; mv temp $(cat nonenglish)
I guess my issue is how these characters get generated in the first place. By cutting and pasting the word "Έντελέχεια" from your email into a file on Linux (via the Synergy mouse & keyboard sharing utility no less), I was able to create a file containing that word and also named that word and display it correctly with cat and ls. So UTF-8 encoding appears to work just fine. It's 8-byte characters in ISO 8859-1 encoding that are causing my problem. Fortunately, I think I don't have to deal with ISO 8859-1 encodings, and my problem was self-created by cutting and pasting characters from the iso_8859-1 man page.
Now I have a follow up question: so far I've only been able to enter non-ASCII characters on my Linux system by cutting & pasting; how do I actually generate any of these characters on a system with a US keyboard?
Thanks for all that have helped me solve this problem.
Alfred
There are a lot of keyboard configuration files under /lib/kbd/keymaps/. One of these is loaded at boot-time, probably the one you configured in when you first set up the system. I don't know all the steps you'll need to do-- I've never tried to do what you're doing-- but read the xmodmap manpage and then examine the keycodes in the keymap files mentioned above. For example, mk-utf.map.gz under /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty has coding to toggle one keymap to another. IOW, you'd type in one language, hit a couple keys to toggle the keyboard into another language, and then hit another couple/three hotkeys to get back to English... or whichever your home language is.
Unless there's some app I don't know about, this is going to be a lot of work, especially if you have to figure out how keymaps work. But work it out and you'll be linux-famous.
Document everything.