How an International Keyboard Works Under DOS

Your Sun international keyboard fully emulates the local-language DOS AT/102 keyboard. Each keyboard offers all the characters in the US-ASCII and the local AT/102 character set, plus any other characters routinely used within that country.

In general, there is nothing unusual about the way this keyboard works for most characters. You press the key and the character appears on the screen. To get an uppercase character, you either hold the Shift key or set the Caps Lock. If there are three characters shown on the key, you hold the Alt-Graph key while pressing the key to get the third character. However, there are a few special ways in which the keyboard operates under DOS:

• The keyboard provides access to more characters than are available on the local-language DOS keyboard.

• Under both DOS and Solaris operating systems, some characters are used both as accents and as separate characters, such as the carat (^) and the tilde (~). Under the Solaris system, these characters have separate keys—one for use as a floating accent and one for the separate character. Under DOS, there is one key that provides both functions. To use the key to enter a floating accent, press the key. To use the key to enter a separate character, simultaneously press the key and the space bar.

• Characters that are not available on the local DOS keyboard may be ignored when you attempt to use them.

Windows 95 uses a different keyboard driver than does DOS. If you want to manually set up Windows 95 to support international keyboards under, you will need to load the DOS keyboard driver.

If you use the environment variables to specify the international keyboard, you will not need to manually set up Windows 95. Refer to Using the Keyboard Environment Variables for more information on the environment variables. For more information on how to perform the manual setup, refer to Setting Device Code Pages .

DOS Character Set

Whenever you, or a program you are using, creates a file under DOS, the DOS character set is used. Whenever you create a file under the Solaris system, the ISO 8859 Latin 1 character set is used. You do not need to be aware of this unless you want to use a DOS file in the Solaris environment, or a Solaris file in the DOS environment. To convert files from one format to the other, two conversion utilities are provided—dos2unix and unix2dos. Only characters that are available in both the DOS character set and the ISO 8859 Latin 1 character set can be converted between formats. Fortunately, most commonly used characters are available in both character sets.

However, if you have a text file that contains special characters, these characters may not be convertible. Most word processors and text-processing programs use special codes in their files to indicate character style or page layout. Most of these programs, however, have options to store the file as “text only” or to “print to a file,” which eliminates the special codes and allows you to convert the file using the dos2unix and unix2dos commands.