On 17-Sep-03 MJ Ray wrote:
No, I mean c-circumflex from the ISO-8859-3 (Southern European) encoding. Sorry for using the imprecise term "Slavic" (I knew the encording began with S, but didn't look up the proper name).
As I'm typing across 3 of the ISO Latin character sets (-1, -3 and -15), I do already have the machine configured for UTF-8, as far as I can tell. Some applications with alternative input methods (yudit, qemacs) can display all the characters, so that's why I think it is an input configuration problem rather than a font problem. I could be wrong.
A follow-up (which may become increasingly irrelevant is unicode/utf8 gets properly integrated into Linux).
Long ago I realised that in Linux/X11 the issues of keyboard input in multilingual documents (i.e. where several languages with incompatible encodings were all present) and rendering/display) of the text had to be separate if it was going to work. The solution was to use good typesetting software (the main candidates in Linux are groff and TeX). You can enter your funnies using ASCII transcriptions, and the software is responsible for ensuring that they come out right. A bit of preliminary work is needed, but afterwards things become pretty straightforward.
As an example, for Cyrillic I made a groff macro "cyr" which sets up a correspondence between character "names" and their groff codes. Excerpt (the original has a lot of lines):
.de cyr .ft AntCy ... .char a \N'193' ... .char [i:] \N'202' .char k \N'203' ... .char o \N'207' ... .char s \N'211' ... .char v \N'215' ... .char [Tch] \N'254' ... ..
(with a corresponding macro /cyr which undoes all these definitions). Each ".char" definition states that the first argument (e.g. [i:]) is the name of a character which will be represented as the glyph at the position (e.g. 202) given by the second aregument in the font which I've called "AntCy" (Antique Cyrillic in the original).
So, for instance, the name of the composer is entered as
.cyr [Tch]a[i:]kovski[i:] ./cyr
which is pretty readable and will be displayed in good Cyrillic. As a more extended example, you could enter the ASCII text
Did .cyr [Kh]ru[shch][yo]v ./cyr like .cyr [Tch]a[i:]kovski[i:]\c ./cyr 's music?
which shows how, in a mixed-language document, it can become a bit cumbersome and not so easy on the eye. However, it works well and is infinitely flexible (provided you have the PostScript fonts needed). Where there are extended passages in one language, then you won't be switching all the time and it gets much more readable.
Similar things are possible with TeX.
Just a comment ... comments invited! Ted.
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