SUMMARY: International character sets with SunOS 4.1

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

My original question:

>With SunOS 4.1 and Type-4 keyboards we now can use international characters
>due to the new 8-bit support.  However, the use of this feature, which is
>most interesting to Europeans and others as well, appears totally undocumented
>in the SunOS 4.1 manual set.  I have so far managed to figure out, that you
>can enable keyboard input of 8-bit characters by "stty pass8".  I have also
>by trial and error learned that, for example, the keystroke sequence
>Compose-a-e will give me a beautiful Danish letter.
>
>But WHY, oh why, is there no manual section describing how to enable the
>Compose feature, and where is the complete table of Compose codes and
>the extended 8-bit ASCII code table ?  And what is the use of the features
>documented in locale(5) ?  And what are the keyboard layouts (images of the
>keyboard, I mean) that you get by loading national key mappings with
>loadkeys(1) ?  After all, these trivial questions were all thoroughly
>documented years ago on DEC systems, when the VT-220 terminals first
>appeared on the market.  Just check the manual that comes with any DEC
>terminal !

The answer is that International Features are indeed documented, but you
would very likely never locate it.  Thanks to Bill Tuthill
(tut at Eng.Sun.COM) and Guy Harris (guy at auspex.com) for their helping hands.

Firstly, with Type-4 keyboards you can enter 8-bit characters, provided
you add the following to your .login file, as documented in the SunOS 4.1
Release Manual, p. 69-70:

stty pass8
setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1

(I think the "stty pass8" gave us trouble if put in the .cshrc, which is
what the Sun manual claims you have to do).  In this place in the Release
manual, some 8-bit support stuff is discussed as well.

Then you turn to the System Services Overview manual (in the Programmer's
Overview / Utilities and Libraries binder), skim chapter 6 ("Native
Language Application Support") and turn to the Appendices A (" ISO Latin 1
Character Set"), B ("U.S. and European Keyboard Layouts"), and C ("Compose
Key and Floating Accent Key Sequences").  (NOTE: I didn't find any of
these keywords in the manual Index nor the Global Index - Sun ought to fix
that in the next print of the manuals).  Hopefully this information
suffices for entering any character from a Type-4 keyboard (I don't know
what solutions are possible with other keyboards - maybe loadkeys(1) can
be used ?).

Finally, if you have a native-language keyboard, the curly and square
brackets etc. are reached by means of the AltGraph key together with the
label printed on the side of certain keycaps.  The files in
/usr/share/lib/keytables describe all details about various keyboard
layouts, including AltGraph.

With these features in place we have succeeded in making our 4.1 machines
truly international.  We have even gotten some recent mods to TeX 3.0 that
allows Danish 8-bit characters to be processed correctly by, e.g., LaTeX,
so we are quite happy now !

With best regards,

Ole H. Nielsen
Laboratory of Applied Physics, Building 307
Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark
E-mail: OHNielsen at ltf.dth.dk
Telephone: (+45) 42 88 24 88 ext. 3187
Telefax:   (+45) 45 93 23 99