Re: Charset problem

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:41:54 +0200, Christian Schröder 
<chschroe@math.uni-goettingen.de> wrote:
>Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> I think this is your problem, right there: on a Posix locale, Emacs
>> disables all its automagic for non-ASCII characters, and expects you
>> to tell it explicitly what to do, which is a pain.
>>
>> Can you set up an ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-10 locale?  If not, why not?
>> I'd expect that users in Germany use a German locale.
>
> As far as I know I have to set the "LANG" or "LC_CTYPE" environment
> variable, or is there any other way to change the locale?  After
> setting LANG to "de_DE" (-> export LANG=de_DE) the output of "locale"
> is as follows:
>
> LANG=de_DE
> LC_CTYPE="de_DE"
> LC_NUMERIC="de_DE"
> LC_TIME="de_DE"
> LC_COLLATE="de_DE"
> LC_MONETARY="de_DE"
> LC_MESSAGES="de_DE"
> LC_PAPER="de_DE"
> LC_NAME="de_DE"
> LC_ADDRESS="de_DE"
> LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE"
> LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE"
> LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE"
> LC_ALL=

That's a fairly "large" set of LC_ and LANG options.  I don't know what
sets all these environment variables, but it may be worth trying a much
simpler set of environment options.  It's probably wrong, for instance,
to use just a language identifier in LC_XXX values.  I would expect
something like "de_DE.ISO8859-15" instead.

Try unsetting all of these LC_XXX variables, and check if a simpler set
of LC_XXX and LANG options works better.  For example, I'm using the
following for Greek support:

    LANG='el_GR'
    LC_ALL='el_GR.ISO8859-7'

That's easier to grasp and remember than 20 or so odd names too :)

> The locale "de_DE.ISO8859-15" (as Peter suggested) doesn't seem to be
> available on my system. At least it is not in the list that "locale
> -a" prints and no directory of this name exists under /usr/lib/locale.

You should try installing it.

Without a proper locale environment, not only Emacs but any other
application will have problems supporting German character sets.