European Localization

Solaris 8 software supports the euro currency. Local currency symbols are still available for backward compatibility.

Multiple Key Compose Sequences for Locales

The Solaris 8 operating environment supports "Compose Sequences" to create the diacritical marks used in writing the scripts covered in the following codesets:

• ISO 8859-2 (Latin2) Czech, Polish, and Hungarian

• ISO 8859-13 (Latin7) Latvian and Lithuanian

• ISO 8859-9 (Latin5) Turkish

These are the diacritic characters that can be created with the following keys and the Compose key.

• diaeresis = citation ( " ) (for example, Compose + A + " = Ä)

• caron = v (for example, Compose + E + v = E caron)

• breve = u

• ogonek = a

• doubleacute = > greater

• degree symbol = O + 0 (o plus zero)

• currency symbol = 0 + x (zero plus x)

Keyboard Support in the Solaris 8 Product

The following locales have keyboard layouts for SPARC (X-server) and IA (Xserver PLUS console):

• Czech

• Hungary

• Poland

• Latvia

• Lithuania

• Russia

• Greece

• Turkey

Changing Between Keyboards on SPARC

Support for changing layouts in the Solaris product is achieved only by using the dip-switch settings under the keyboard. The keyboard layout is determined by the dip switches. A list of keyboard layouts and corresponding defined dip-switch settings is at /usr/openwin/share/etc/keytables/keytable.map.

The following is a layout table for a type 4 keyboard (1=switch up, 0=switch down).

Changing the layout from U.S./GB to Czech is done by changing the dip-switch settings to the setting defined in the file. The file defines the switches in hex. This needs to be converted into binary and then re-booted.

Russian and Greek keyboard support can be toggled on and off using the SPARC Compose key (Ctrl+Shift+F1 on IA).

Changing Between Keyboards on IA

On IA, a keyboard is selected during the kdmconfig part of install. To change this at any time after installation, use kdmconfig:

1. Exit CDE/OW to the command line.

2. Type kdmconfig -u (kdmconfig unconfigure).

3. Type kdmconfig to run the program.

4. Follow instructions to get a keyboard layout.

There are no `utilities' for either SPARC or IA (apart from standard UNIX tools such as xmodmap, pcmapkeys) bundled into Solaris 8 for switching keyboards.

Codesets for IA

The default codeset on the Solaris system for IA is ISO-8859-1. The IBM DOS 437 codeset is provided as an option in text mode. That is, if you choose to download IBM DOS 437 codeset by typing:

loadfont -c 437
pcmapkeys -f /usr/share/lib/keyboards/437/en_US

Nonstandard U.S. date, time, currency, numbers, units, and collation are not supported. Non-English message and text presentation is not supported, nor is multibyte character support. Therefore, non-Microsoft Windows users should use the IBM DOS 437 codeset only in the default C locale.

• You must be in the text mode to download the IBM codeset, not the graphics mode.

• If you are not using the standard U.S. PC keyboard, replace en_US with the keyboard map related to your keyboard.

• To download the default codeset in text mode, type:

  loadfont -c 8859 pcmapkeys -f /usr/share/lib/keyboards/8859/en_US

• See the loadfont and pcmapkeys man pages.

All of the locales support character input and output. There is also iconv support for many of the major codesets. (For more on iconv, see iconv(1).

Font Formats

Location of Fonts on the System

Fonts to support European locales are available in various formats, such as bitmaps, Postscript^TMType-1, and TrueType. The actual availability varies per character set.

Fonts are located at:

/usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso_8859_x/X11/fonts/

Adding and Removing Font Packages

To manually add font packages to the system:

1. Always add the required font packages before the optional font packages.

2. Remove the optional font packages first, when you are removing font packages from the system.

You must follow this procedure to add or remove fonts. The class action scripts in the font packages depend on this to function properly. The optional font packages contain scripts that concatenate information onto the required font packages that are already resident on the system. If the required font packages are not there, problems can occur.