On 18-Dec-98 jeff wrote:

I have recently been converted to Linux (SUSE 5.3) and think it's great,

Welcome!!

but have run into one minor stumbling block: I haven't figured out how to type the foreign characters (å ä ö ü ß) I need for Swedish and German. Till now I've been entering them in TeX-style control codes (\aa, \ae etc) and converting them to the proper characters with macros, but this gets pretty tiresome everytime I want to send a quick email.

If it's mainly email you need this for, then the most straightforward thing to do is to install an email client that can handle it internally. XFMail, which I'm using, offers a choice of us-ascii, iso-8859-1 (Latin-1, mainly W Euro languages) iso-8859-2 (E Euro), ... iso-8859-9 (Turkish), iso-8859-10 (Nordic, though this is mostly covered already in 8859-1), and koi-8 (cyrillic) as default, and you can also switch to any of the others for particular messages. These refer to what gets displayed on the screen, so you have to have the charset fonts in the X fontpath. You enter them by "digraph" keystrokes (e.g. Ctrl-D e ' gives é); unfortunately these are fixed at what's mnemonic for 8859-1, so you need a look-up table for other languages. Also, if you want to edit a non-email text file with foreign characters, don't forget that vim has similar "digraph" support with the advantage that you can rig up a "vimrc" file to change the digraph keystrokes. You could use vim as the default editor for your email cilent of choice (though you may then have to worry about on-screen display). So, to complete this quick email, here's a few: En små sætning i Dansk. Grüßen! À bientôt, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Date: 18-Dec-98 Time: 19:56:29 -------------------------------------------------------------------- - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e Check out the SuSE-FAQ at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A">http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A</A>> and the archiv at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A">http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A</A>>