386i: International character set problems

Gunnar Stefansson mcvax!hafro.is!gunnar at uunet.uu.net
Tue Mar 14 11:29:07 AEST 1989


We have some problems with the international character sets on our Sun
386i and would like to know if anyone knows about solutions (hacks,
patches,...)

1. The keymaps that allow for a floating acute accent do not seem to allow
   an acute accent on Y. The mechanism works fine for all other vowels,
   including lower case y. Unfortunately, Y-with-an-acute-accent is an
   Icelandic character, so we need this (it's also in the font, and can be
   generated via bindings to the alt-graph key, so it's a bit strange that
   the floating mechanism does not work).

2. There appears to be a screw-up between the DOS and Unix environments in
   that an IBM Code Page 850 keyboard setup will work in DOS when the Unix
   environment is using the standard US keymap, but not when an Icelandic
   keymap has been set up within Unix (in fact the DOS environment seems to
   lose completely track of characters which are bound non-ascii characters
   within the Unix environment; nothing at all is generated).  The behavior
   is very strange -- one would have expected to see at least garbage (ISO
   8859/1 represented with Code Page 850 fonts).

Ideally one would like to have the option of running two different
character sets: ISO 8859/1 in Unix and IBM Code Page 850 in DOS.  This is
in fact how Sun has set up its fonts.

I would settle for ISO in both or even Code Page in both, but not the way
it is, i.e. being able to use international characters only in one and not
the other.

Gunnar



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