Hi all... I have an odd setup with SuSE. I'm using 9.1 with a German keyboard but all the software I use is in English. BUTTT I write allot about German stamps so I need the German letters. I can type German letters in, üöä߀ and so on. The problem is with my wife's system. She uses WP4.2 in English. I save something that she writes as an ASCII file which shows the German fine on her dos system. But when I transfer it to my SuSE system all the German letters show up as either small squares or just blanks. Any ideas on how to fix this? (other than getting a new wife <G>) TIA! JIM -- Jim Hatridge Linux User #88484 ------------------------------------------------------ BayerWulf Linux System # 129656 The Recycled Beowulf Project Looking for throw-away or obsolete computers and parts to recycle into a Linux super computer WartHog Bulletin Info about new German Stamps http://www.fuzzybunnymilitia.org/~hatridge/bulletin Viel Feind -- Viel Ehr' Anti-US Propaganda stamp collection http://www.fuzzybunnymilitia.org/~hatridge/collection
James Hatridge wrote:
The problem is with my wife's system. She uses WP4.2 in English. I save something that she writes as an ASCII file which shows the German fine on her dos system. But when I transfer it to my SuSE system all the German letters show up as either small squares or just blanks.
How are you viewing the files on your machine?
Any ideas on how to fix this? (other than getting a new wife <G>)
I don't know anything about how WP saves ASCII files, but it's almost certainly a code page / character set problem. There are a number of things you can try - if you're using Konsole, try selecting the unicode font - that would be a start. If that doesn't help you can use iconv to convert from one encoding to another, but that kind of assumes you know what encoding WP is using. If you can open the file in Mozilla and try the various character encodings until the characters look right, that might help. If you get no joy, you can send me an example file and I'll see if I can figure out how to view it.
HI sjb et al... OK, I got it more or less working. I used your idea of viewing the file in Mozilla. I then played with the different settings until I found one that showed the German letters. It turns out that my wife's machine uses IBM850 code. What the hell ever happened to simple ASCII? Anyway I then used iconv to change it to utf-8. Now I can see the German letters without problems. Is there anyway I can add IBM850 to the normal list of character sets? Thanks, JIM On Thursday 05 August 2004 18:26, sjb wrote:
James Hatridge wrote:
The problem is with my wife's system. She uses WP4.2 in English. I save something that she writes as an ASCII file which shows the German fine on her dos system. But when I transfer it to my SuSE system all the German letters show up as either small squares or just blanks.
How are you viewing the files on your machine?
Any ideas on how to fix this? (other than getting a new wife <G>)
I don't know anything about how WP saves ASCII files, but it's almost certainly a code page / character set problem.
There are a number of things you can try - if you're using Konsole, try selecting the unicode font - that would be a start.
If that doesn't help you can use iconv to convert from one encoding to another, but that kind of assumes you know what encoding WP is using. If you can open the file in Mozilla and try the various character encodings until the characters look right, that might help.
If you get no joy, you can send me an example file and I'll see if I can figure out how to view it.
-- Jim Hatridge Linux User #88484 ------------------------------------------------------ BayerWulf Linux System # 129656 The Recycled Beowulf Project Looking for throw-away or obsolete computers and parts to recycle into a Linux super computer WartHog Bulletin Info about new German Stamps http://www.fuzzybunnymilitia.org/~hatridge/bulletin Viel Feind -- Viel Ehr' Anti-US Propaganda stamp collection http://www.fuzzybunnymilitia.org/~hatridge/collection
James Hatridge wrote:
Anyway I then used iconv to change it to utf-8. Now I can see the German letters without problems. Is there anyway I can add IBM850 to the normal list of character sets?
I'm sure there must be .. but I don't know what it is, sorry >8-( Without going into long and boring stories about problems with character codings (and I've got hundreds of 'em!), I'd recommend always using UTF8 for everything.
Fri, 06 Aug 2004, by ottaky@ottaky.com:
James Hatridge wrote:
Anyway I then used iconv to change it to utf-8. Now I can see the German letters without problems. Is there anyway I can add IBM850 to the normal list of character sets?
I'm sure there must be .. but I don't know what it is, sorry >8-(
Without going into long and boring stories about problems with character codings (and I've got hundreds of 'em!), I'd recommend always using UTF8 for everything.
It would be nice if it worked, however I never got 8-bit characters to show correctly with UTF-8. With LANG set to en_GB and using a 8859-15 font for the terminals everything works as it should. Theo -- Theo v. Werkhoven Registered Linux user# 99872 http://counter.li.org ICBM 52 13 27N , 4 29 45E. + ICQ: 277217131 SUSE 9.1 + Jabber: gurp@nedlinux.nl Kernel 2.6.5 + MSN: twe-msn@ferrets4me.xs4all.nl See headers for PGP/GPG info. +
Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:
It would be nice if it worked, however I never got 8-bit characters to show correctly with UTF-8. With LANG set to en_GB and using a 8859-15 font for the terminals everything works as it should.
Unfortunately, support isn't yet perfect (although I believe the latest SuSE distros claim to support UTF8 properly?) I run SuSE 8.0 on a dual boot Japanese Vaio with Japanese XP. To see the Kanji / Katakana / Hiragana charcters on the Windows partition I have this entry in fstab /dev/hda1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,iocharset=utf8 0 0 and I use an xterm like this LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 xterm -u8 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1" -fw "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-18-120-100-100-c-180-iso10646-1" which works for the most part. I work for a company that builds websites and back-end solutions for motor manufacturers. A few years back we deployed several hundred websites in a large number of languages for Bentley - naturally, the design team came up with a re-usable template and the customer insisted the sites incorporate Flash elements for menus and some content managed material. This meant that one template had to display everything from English to Korean, to Japanese to Cyrillic. As it happens, Flash supports UTF-8 but, unfortunately, much of the material that went in to the websites was legacy information that was supplied in all kinds of formats and encodings. In the end I had to set non-unicode character sets for the HTML pages and manually convert everything for the Flash movies .. it was a pain, and it's still a pain to maintain .. especially as our stock Solaris OS only supports a very small number of character sets and I have to download everything to my Linux box, convert it, and then upload it again. http://www.bentleyguaranteed.com/moscow/ru/ As it happens, I've just finished a big project for Ferrari and Maserati which has a similar goal - to build and maintain every Ferrari and Maserati dealer's website throughout the world. Unfortunately, once again, there's a lot of legacy material in Italian, German, French and English so those languages are using regular European character sets with UTF8 encoded Flash content. But I will be collecting material for every other language in UTF8 - it's *so* much easier. The dealers and importers use a web form to enter text, the pages are encoded using UTF8 so I don't have to mess around with it afterwards and I just put an .htaccess file in the root of each website that ensures the HTTP headers specify UTF8 as a the charset for each page served. http://www.maseratidealers.com/demodealer I built a Japanese site the other day, but I can't remember the URL ;-)
James Hatridge
I save something that she writes as an ASCII file which shows the German
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ <nitpick> That can't be, as ASCII has no umlauts :) </nitpick>
fine on her dos system. But when I transfer it to my SuSE system all the German letters show up as either small squares or just blanks.
The reason is the differing encoding. DOS uses codepages 437 or 852, whereas your Linux system uses either iso-8859-1 (< 9.1) or utf-8 (>= 9.1). Use recode to change the encoding: recode ibmpc..lat1 <textfile> for latin1 aka iso-8859-1 or recode ibmpc..utf-8 for transformation to utf-8. Philipp
participants (4)
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James Hatridge -
Philipp Thomas -
sjb -
Theo v. Werkhoven