Locales, Mutt, OpenOffice, Emacs [was: locales and terminal]
hi,
sorry to take a whie responding back to this thread. Ie been trying
out various solutions proposed here, in other threads from the last
month or so, and in a couple of places on the web. I haven't been
able to fix my problem, but I can gve a more precise description of it
now.
The Problem:
I need to be able to write and read accented characters (in French,
German, and Spanish) in both email and formatted text documents.
The Setup:
Debian Woody, running KDE 2.
What I've done so far:
-run localeconf several times, enabling the generation of various french, german, and
english locales.
-run locale-gen a bunch of times, too.
-set environment variables (usuay $LANG and either $LC_CTYPE or $LC_ALL in /etc/profile, .bashrc, and a
console/terminal window
What I've figured out:
-in most situations, I can read and write accented characters without
difficuly! I use a saved email as a test: cat, more, and
less all show accented characters properly. xemacs also displays and
generates accented characters. So does jed, and so does kword.
-unfortunately, the three programs for which I really REQUIRE this
feature simply don't work properly:
-mutt simply WON'T display accented characters properly\. Depending
on whether I set the CHARSET variable (in .muttrc) to UTF-8 or
iso-8859-1, accented characters display as ? or \xxx (a three-digit
numerical dcode).
-terminal-based emacs (emacs -nw, which I use to write emails, especially when
I'm not at my desk) will not display accented charactersm. When I try
to type them in using the us-with-deadkeys keyboard, emacs freaks out
and sometimes crashes.
-openoffice can read accented characters, but it won't accept them
from my keyboard: Oddly, if I use a French keyboard setting oo can
read french characters; if I use a German keyboard it can read
umlauted characters; but it simply doesnt seem to be able to handle
the characters composed with dead keys.
It seems to me, after lots of experimentation, that this isn't exactly
a problem with locales, but a problem with the relevant programs.
does anyone have any idea what I should do next??
response to earlier posting:
> > I've recently started geting emails in french and german that I need
> > to be able read. And I'd like to be able to respond to them in french
> > and german as well...
> >
> > so I set LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 .
>
> Is this variable exported to other programs?
well, I use the command "export", eg, "export $LANG=en_US.UTF-8"
but I feel like mutt, at least, doesn't automatically import the
variables from the environment.
>
> With UTF-8 you need a multibyte aware terminal emulator. Which terminal
> emulator do you use? Try mlterm as it allows you to change the encoding
> at run time (Ctrl-button3).
I'[ve been using kterm -- mlterm wouldn't run on my system for some
reason and I didn't want to expend the energy necessary to fix it.
> For emacs, it might be a good idea to install mule-ucs. Yudit is also a
> very nice UTF aware editor with integrated truetype support.
what is mule-ucs?
>
> > the other thing is, when I run dpkg-reconfigure locales, it doesn't
> > let me set the default locale. The menu dialog comes up, but there
> > are no choices.
>
> Weird. Did you choose to generate the desired locales then?
- I did, and this onaly happenekd once. ANother time, localeconf ran
through the whole set of options twice... I'm not sure what's
up,. but this last time it worked normally.
thanks for everything, matt
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