Using European character sets
This documentation is for DOS Arachne - Linux Arachne comes with
iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-2 font sets. Current font set is selected
by ~/.arachne/arachne.conf variable FontPathSuffix.
Other font sets must be manualy unpacked from DOS APM format using
unarj and stored in proper subdidrectory of
PREFIX/share/arachne.
0. Do you need to read this ?
If you are using Arachne only to read web pages in English language,
and/or to send and receive eMails written in English, you are very
lucky - you don't have to worry about this stuff.
1. Fonts
Basic font sets for Arachne are available as
Arachne Packages. There are three basic packages
available: ISO-8859-1 (USA, Western Europe), ISO-8859-2 (Central Europe)
and Windows-1251 (Cyrillic). Alternative packages with CP-895 (prefered
Czech encoding for MS-DOS) and KOI-8-R (Cyrillic) are available too.
You can create your own fonts set from Windows TTF fonts using TTF2FNT
utility.
2. Keyboard
You can use any DOS keyboard driver you wish, but you must tell
Arachne which ISO-8859-x (or Windows-12xx...) characters should
be displayed after typing accented letters on your keyboard.
This is very easy - just fill translation table on
Options | Local settings screen:
1. Turn on your TSR keyboard driver (from DOS command line)
2. Install requested font set to Arachne.
3. Deactivate any existing keyboard map and restart Arachne.
4. Press corresponding key for each accented letter you have on your keyboard.
Important: you shouldn't see correct characters in input field! If you
see them, it means that you don't have to use keyboard map!
5. Press any dummy key (eg. dot - '.') for each unused accented letter.
6. Save and activate new keyboard map and then restart Arachne.
3. Getting correct charset
Properly configured web server will send you document in your
local charset, if browser sends HTTP keyword "Accept-charset".
APM packages configure this keyword automaticaly, but you can check
it at Options | Local settings screen.
4. Receiving eMails
All "Content-type:" lines in MIME headers are converted to
<META HTTP-EQIV="Content-type" ...> tags - see paragraph 6 below.
Of course, for most e-mails you won't need any conversion tables,
because ISO-Latin-1 and ISO-Latin-2 encodings are standards for
Internet e-mail exchage, and they are (more or less) accepted even
by Microsoft.
5. Sending eMails
You have to use either 8bit or quted-printable encoding
(see Options | Network settings) for outgoing
e-mail, and you have also to specify your character set correctly
(see Options | Local settings).
6. <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" ...> tag
Yes. You need just 256bytes long translation table to your current
character set (these tables are included in APM packages). And luckily,
Microsoft FrontPage is able to automaticaly insert this tag to HTML
pages! Example:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=X">
X
| Arachne will read conversion table from file
|
windows-1250
| SYSTEM\CODEPAGE\1250.cp
|
iso-8859-2
| SYSTEM\CODEPAGE\8859-2.cp
|
etc.
|
7. Printing
For ASCII printing, you can configure some additional encoding filter
to your MIME.CFG file - lines file/print.dgi and file/printcom.dgi.
PostScript printing of ISO-Latin-1 and ISO-Latin-2 documets is not yet
implemented, but it seems that there exists some solution.
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