LinuxQuestions.org - Encoding Problems UTF-8 or ISO-blahblah

Quote:

Originally Posted by funkyslacker (Post 5003616)

Hi,

I have some trouble with the encoding. I use UTF-8 most of the time, but sometimes I have encoding problems in X and command-line or other OS.

I'm from Germany and I want/need the special chars like ä, ö, ü, etc.
But when I rename a file e.g. "öffentlich.doc" (engl. public.doc) my command line can't encode the char "ö" correct.

Can anyone explain the encoding scheme in linux and what's the best encoding for me and why my X and command-line uses different encoding schemes?

When you say 'command-line' do you mean outside of X? Or in an xterm-like terminal inside X?

For the former, my UTF Linux Console page that BrianL linked should be useful.

If you mean in an xterm then you still need you LANG setup for utf-8 (check the locale command and look in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh). You also need a suitable font that contains the correct character set. Usually you can't go wrong with Deja Vu Sans Mono, Liberation Mono or Droid Sans Mono (Droid is on slackbuilds.org). And of course you need to use a UTF-8 capable terminal. Default in Slack are 'Terminal' (part of xfce), 'Konsole' (kde) and 'xterm -u8'. I tend to use urxvt (rxvt-unicode on slackbuilds.org) as it is much more configurable than xterm and lighter than Terminal or Konsole. There are also others around.

You may also set alt-gr to be the 'compose' key (X knows it as the Multi_Key) in ~/.Xmodmap:

keycode 108 = Multi_key Multi_key

Where 108 is the keycode found with xev. Then 'xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap' to apply the settings, or restart X.

Then accented characters can be typed using alt-gr. To make a 'ö' do alt-gr " o

I hope the above is useful.