Re: lynx-dev character sets

[Doug Kaufman]

On Sun, 30 Aug 1998, Laura Eaves wrote:

> Could someone familiar with charset issues please clarify the following?
> I've noticed on some websites I get funny graphic characters in foreign words.
> I assume this has to do with my display charset being wrong.  (For example,
> I should see an e with a ` over it, but get a funny graphic instead.)

I am certainly not a character set expert, but I have set this up for my
own use. The usual problem is that the document is in ISO 8859-1 (the
same as Latin1), and your terminal is either set up with a different
character set (on MSDOS this is usually cp437), or is set up to use only
7bit characters (usually on unix). The best place I know that explains
how to do this is the ISO 8859 FAQ at:
"http://www.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at/mike/8bit/FAQ-ISO-8859-1";
Seeing "funny graphic characters" usually means that you are on MSDOS
using cp437.

If you are on MSDOS, you can get some simple conversions by
setting your display character set to DosLatinUS (cp437). For full
compatibility, you can set your display character set to DosLatin1
(cp850), but you need to set the MSDOS display to cp850 with
DISPLAY.SYS in your CONFIG.SYS file, and with the MODE command. Another
option which I frequently use, is to change the character set on your
local screen to cp819 (the same as ISO 8859-1). To do this, you first
need to install the files available from:
"ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/doc/ISO/charsets/isocp101.zip";.
  
> "assumed charset" and "display charset".  "assumed is set to ISO-8859-1.
> "display charset" is set to ISO-Latin-1.
> Furthermore, there is no ISO-8859-1 in the choices for display charset.

Perhaps we should indicate that ISO 8859-1 and ISO-Latin-1 are one and
the same.
                              Doug  

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Doug Kaufman
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