Re: FAQ, German Umlauts

[Wolfgang Hukriede <whukriede@ifm.uni-kiel.de>]

Hello!

On Wed, 25 Jun 97 18:40:26 +0200 Uli Zappe <uli@tallowcross.uni-frankfurt.de>
wrote:

> while it is great that zsh is able to deal with the lower case
> German letters
>
> d  (ae)
> v  (oe)
> |  (ue)   and
> _  (ss)
>
> unfortunately it doesn't do so yet with the capital letters
>
> D (AE)
> V  (OE)
> \  (UE)
>
> Does anybody know if this will be fixed in the foreseeable future?

That is, because your (otherwise fabulous) operating-system encodes
Ae as 0205, Oe as 0226, Ue as 0232, which codes are in the range 0200
to 0237. This range does not display anything under the latin-1 encoding.

Now:

On Wed, 25 Jun 1997 15:49:45 +0200 Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de> wrote:

> Subject: Z-Shell Frequently Asked Questions (monthly posting)
> Changes since last issue:
>
> 3.6:      New question on displaying eight bit characters.
>
> 3.6: How do I make the completion list use eight bit characters?
>
>   You are probably creating files with non-ASCII characters, such as
>   accented characters, and find they show up in the completion list as
>   \M-i or something such.  This is because the library routines
>   (not zsh itself) which test whether a character is printable have
>   replied that it is not; zsh has simply found a way to show them
>   anyway.
>
>   The answer, under a modern POSIXy operating system, is to find a
>   locale where these are treated as printable characters.  Zsh has
>   handling for locales built in and will recognise when you set a
>   relevant variable. You need to look in /usr/lib/locale to find one
>   which suits you; the subdirectories correspond to the locale names.
>   The simplest possibility is likely to be en_US, so that the simplest
>   answer to your problem is to set
>
>     LC_CTYPE=en_US
>
>   when your terminal is capable of showing eight bit characters.  If
>   you only have a default domain (called C), you may need to have some
>   additional files installed on your system.

Peter, I think you're on the wrong road here. The locale settings cannot
change hardware-properties, can they?

Why don't you just pass through all 8-bit-encodings, or possibly add (yet
another) zsh-option, which at least allows this. You simply cannot tell
something about the users hardware. Even if you get everything right so far,
when say, someone changes his/her terminal font or encoding vector, it's
immediately broken again. If at all, these settings belong under complete
user-control. You're asking way too much from the locale system here.

Wolfgang.