12. How to make other programs work with non-ASCII chars

In the bad old days this used to be quite a hassle. Every separate program had to be convinced individually to leave your bits alone. Not that all is easy now, but recently a lot of gnu utilities have learned to react to LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1 or LC_CTYPE=iso-8859-1. Try this first, and if it doesn't help look at the hints below. Note that in recent versions of libc the routine setlocale() only works if you have installed the locale files (e.g. in /usr/lib/locale).

First of all, the 8-th bit should survive the kernel input processing, so make sure to have stty cs8 -istrip -parenb set.

A. For emacs the details strongly depend on the version. The information below is for version 19.34. Put lines

        (set-input-mode nil nil 1)
        (standard-display-european t)
        (require 'iso-syntax)

This is a good start. On a terminal that cannot display non-ASCII ISO 8859-1 symbols, the command

        (load-library "iso-ascii")

        (load-library "iso-transl")

The command

        (iso-accents-mode)

        (iso-accents-customize LANGUAGE)

Since the Linux default compose character is Ctrl-. it might be convenient to use that everywhere. Try

        (load-library "iso-insert.el")
        (define-key global-map [?\C-.] 8859-1-map)

        XTerm*VT100.Translations:       #override\n\
              Ctrl <KeyPress> . : string("\0308")

B. For less, put LESSCHARSET=latin1 in the environment. This is also what you need if you see \255 or <AD> in man output: some versions of less will render the soft hyphen (octal 0255, hex 0xAD) this way when not given permission to output Latin-1.

C. For ls, give the option -N. (Probably you want to make an alias.)

D. For bash (version 1.13.*), put

        set meta-flag on
        set convert-meta off

        set output-meta on

E. For tcsh, use

        setenv LANG     US_en
        setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1

F. For flex, give the option -8 if the parser it generates must be able to handle 8-bit input. (Of course it must.)

G. For elm, set displaycharset to ISO-8859-1. (Danish HOWTO: LANG=C and LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1)

H. For programs using curses (such as lynx) David Sibley reports: The regular curses package uses the high-order bit for reverse video mode (see flag _STANDOUT defined in /usr/include/curses.h). However, ncurses seems to be 8-bit clean and does display iso-latin-8859-1 correctly.

I. For programs using groff (such as man), make sure to use -Tlatin1 instead of -Tascii. Old versions of the program man also use col, and the next point also applies.

J. For col, make sure 1) that it is fixed so as to do setlocale(LC_CTYPE,""); and 2) put LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1 in the environment.

K. For rlogin, use option -8.

L. For joe, sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/apps/editors/joe-1.0.8-linux.tar.gz is said to work after editing the configuration file. Someone else said: joe: Put the -asis option in /isr/lib/joerc in the first column.

M. For LaTeX: \documentstyle[isolatin]{article}. For LaTeX2e: \documentclass{article}\usepackage{isolatin} where isolatin.sty is available from ftp://ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at/pub/8bit.

A nice discussion on the topic of ISO-8859-1 and how to manage 8-bit characters is contained in the file grasp.insa-lyon.fr:/pub/faq/fr/accents (in French). Another fine discussion (in English) can be found in ftp.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at:/pub/8bit/FAQ-ISO-8859-1, which is mirrored in rtfm.mit.edu:pub/usenet-by-group/comp.answers/character-sets/iso-8859-1-faq.

If you need to fix a program that behaves badly with 8-bit characters, one thing to keep in mind is that if you have a signed char type then characters may be negative, and using them as an array index will fail. Several programs can be fixed by judiciously adding (unsigned char) casts.