French Characters in Login Banner

[Sally Devine]

Hi all,

I have to set up a login banner on our UNIX systems. However, being in Canada, the banner has to be English and French.

Does anyone know how to get french characters on the screen and how to create them in the /etc/motd using vi?

TIA,
sd

[Joris Denayer]

Hi,

I started a terminal session an my PC.
then
Start --> All Programs -> Accesoires -> System Tools --> Character Map

You get than the complete ISO-Latin set.
Now it is rather easy to copy/paste accentuated characters in the session.

Of course, if you have a FRENCH Azert keyboard, it should be easier.

Joris

[Sally Devine]

That didn't work for me. It just showed all the special characters as squares. Thanks for the response though.

sd

[Joris Denayer]

When do you see these squares ?
When you edit with vi ?
When you do cat /etc/motd ?

Can you post a file with accentuated chars ?

Your terminal must support ISO-LATIN or ISO8859/1.

I attached a file containing accentuated characters. Check what this prouces on your screen.
This is the content : éèçæêë

[Sally Devine]

I created the file on my Windows machine as you stated with the Character Map utility. Then I just pasted it into a file on the unix box. When I did a cat of the file there were just squares where the special characters should have been.

I can see your characters that you typed because I am using the internet and this forum from my windows system. The characters that I cannot see are on the unix system.

sd

[Joris Denayer]

Did you copy the attached file on your unix system ?

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi,
what os do you have? Have you installed the additional french language set in Tru Unix?

Michael

[Joris Denayer]

Michael,

It is not necessary to install something special to visualize french characters.

Something I forgot to mention previously. In your stty-settings, you must verify that you use the full 8 bits.
# stty -a must give cs8 among other values.
If not, give following command
# stty cs8

I attached a file that contains a small subset of these accentuated characters.
It contains the hex-values as defined in iso8859/1. (man iso8859-1 will help)

E0 SMALL LETTER a WITH GRAVE ACCENT
E1 SMALL LETTER a WITH ACUTE ACCENT
E2 SMALL LETTER a WITH CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT
E3 SMALL LETTER a WITH TILDE
E4 SMALL LETTER a WITH DIAERSIS
E5 SMALL LETTER a WITH RING ABOVE
E6 SMALL DIPHTHONG a WITH e
E7 SMALL LETTER c WITH CEDILLA
E8 SMALL LETTER e WITH GRAVE ACCENT
E9 SMALL LETTER e WITH ACUTE ACCENT
EA SMALL LETTER e WITH CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT
EB SMALL LETTER e WITH DIAERSIS
EC SMALL LETTER i WITH GRAVE ACCENT
ED SMALL LETTER i WITH ACUTE ACCENT
EE SMALL LETTER i WITH CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT
EF SMALL LETTER i WITH DIAERSIS

If no translation is done, you will see the correct accentuated characters on your terminal session. (dtterm, dxterm, xterm, reflection, kea , putty, ...)

So, if your terminal supports ISO8859/1 (which is an 8bit codeset), it will work fine.
When will it also go wrong ?
If you configure your terminal to work in ASCII with a national variant. Here a very small subset of some french chars are mapped over standard ASCII values. This is completely useless.

Hope this helps.

[Ralf Puchner]

install the wordwide language kit for french. Have a look into the i18n documentation. Use wwsetup to add additional languages to X11.

After it was installed select "option" "language" "french" on the login screen.

[Joris Denayer]

Tssk..
On my system, it works fine and following command produces no output.
# setld -i | grep IOS