[ILUG] UTF-8, how to type ``Latin Small Letter e With Acute''?

[Brian Foster]

  | Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 13:53:36 +0200
  | From: David Neary <dneary at wanadoo.fr>
  | References: <200205300957.g4U9vaX04925 at linux.local>
  | 
  | Brian Foster wrote:
  |  > I've been playing with using UTF-8 encoding (rather than
  |  > ISO-8859-15) with the Xfree86 v4.<something> supplied with
  |  > my SuSE 7.3 system.  whilst there are numerous niggles,
  |  > the issue currently driving me batty is I cannot figure out
  |  > how to input (type in) characters such as  é  (Latin Small
  |  > Letter e with Acute; that is, ISO-8859-15 code E9 hex, or
  |  > UTF-8 octet stream C3 A9 hex) from my UK+€ (English) QWERTY
  |  > keyboard.
  | 
  | Either use an editor which supports UTF-8 (such as emacs or vim
  | with the necessary extentions, which I've never managed to get
  | right, or gedit-2, or Mozilla composer), and do the compose-e-'
  | thing, followed by an explicit "save encoded as UTF-8",

 sorry, I wasn't clear in my original posting....  been there,
 done that, doesn't work.  regardless of the application I use,
 xterm(1), vim(1), and on and on, COMPOSE isn't composing but
 eating the next two keys (whether or not it's a valid compose
 sequence!).   but I haved managed to start gvim(1)'s which
 almost work, albeit don't understand how/why yet .... !?

  |                                                         or use
  | some kind of token to replace it (I ended up replacing all the
  | és with &eacute; in my html CV).

 as a general rule always use entities (e.g., ``&eacute;'')
 in HTML and XML --- in fact, some HTML-editors auto-generate
 the entities.  never use explicit values (e.g., ``&#xxxx;'')
 which are apriori charset-dependent, even if the charset is
 declared in the META Content-Type tag.   but this HTML/XML
 side-issue is neither here nor there ....

 a cute(-ish) application for selecting individual Unicode
 glyphs is ucm(1).

  |  > I'm using ``xterm -u8'' with an ISO-10646-1 font that has the
  |  > necessary  é  glyph, and (AFAIK) the locale is consistent (and
  |  > not relevant?).  sans ``-u8'' COMPOSE works, so it's not an
  |  > xterm(1) problem per se (unlike, or so it seems, Eterm(1)).
  | 
  | Afriad I don't know anthing about utf-8 xterm :) Sorry. You could
  | use some kind of utility to utf-8ise your iso-8859-15 document

 iconv(1) seems to do a good job of converting to/from UTF-8.

 I never said anything about any document in any encoding.
 instead, I'm toying with the idea of running the whole system
 as UTF-8, ah la Plan 9 ... as my normal working environment.
 (mad or what? ...don't answer!)   you are correct, for dealing
 with individual UTF-8 documents, xterm+iconv+vim looks like it
 should work fairly well.

 to get UTF-8 vim to behave sensibly (with X11R6 on my system,
 dunno about the console &tc):
   1.       :set encoding=utf-8
   2.       :set fileencoding=...  as appropriate
   3(vim).  use ``xterm -u8'' with a fixed-width ISO-10646-1 font
   3(gvim). :set guifont=...  also a fixed-width ISO-10646-1 font
 if the UTF-8 locale is valid, vim/gvim does the 1st one Ok,
 and somehow tries the 2nd (doesn't seem to always work?).
 it's gvim's guifont which annoys me.  I just threw together
 a bash(1) script which, after Very Limited testing, starts
 up an UTF-8 vim or gvim from any locale (UTF-8 or not).

 but I'm still mystified as to COMPOSE ?!??  any ideas?

 ( bizarrely, some gvim's started by the above-mentioned
  script do handle COMPOSE --- not 100% but close .... )

cheers!
	-blf-
--
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