Euro symbol under vt220 emulation

[Simon Pamplin]

We are running HP UX 11i and have a character based application that use the Ingres RDBMS.

The issue we have at present is that we need to generate the euro symbol (not map the key) when using a character based terminal emulator. All HP documentation refers to achieving this under 'X' but the indications are that it is not possible for plain old character emulation. I can do this quite happily on other flavours of Unix but not HP - has anyone found a work around?

Your help would be appreciated.

[Alex Glennie]

Just to add since Simon has a call open with the UKRC that I'd too appreciate any info on how customers may be working around this ...

although the euro symbol can't be mapped to a euro symbol on a console or PC emulator - (eg vt220) that I'm aware of, I'm sure there must be a way to get the characters into a database.

Anyone tried this or encountered similar problems ?

[Bill Hassell]

It's important to understand that vt220 (or vtAnything) is an emulation of a terminal product line that has been obsolete for a couple of decades, so by definition, there never was a Euro 20 years ago, therefore no behavior to emulate.

The real problem is inherent in any character mode terminal. It either has the symbol stored in it's character generator or it doesn't. Mapping on the HP side simply takes one byte of data and changes it to another, thus changing the display. But if there is no Euro symbol in the character generator, there's nothing to map.

You'll need a more modern emulator to show the symbol.

[Alex Glennie]

That's my understanding too Bill ,so since Simon is using a PC vt2## X emulator currently,
I guess we need to know if it supports the euro character or if he has any other altenative emulator which could support the euro.

Simon : which emulation package and version are you using ?

[Volker Borowski]

First check, if your are correctly localized!

Should be ISO-8859-15 (EURO) not -1 !!

With this codepage, the Euro-Symbol should have x'A4' as code. In patched Windows fonts the ???-char is located at x'80'.

So you need to map PC-HEX '80' to send 'A4' which will be "Euro" but only if the receiving programe is localized with ISO-8859-15.

http://www.swt.at/produkte/euro.htm (German unfortunately)

http://download.wrq.com has a patch for Reflection-X to integrate ???. Search for "euro".

Hope this helps
Volker

[Simon Pamplin]

I appreciate all the comments made so far, I think I need to clarify some points. I must congratulate the forum members on their swift response to my posting (big points will be gladly awarded if someone fixes this for me).

The emulator I'm using is NETTEM that runs a straight forward vt200 character emulation. It is not an X emulator.

On my Data General Unix box, using the same emulator, I can do ALT-0128 or ALTGR 4 and get a euro symbol on screen. I now need to be able to do the same thing on my nice new HP Unix box.

I don't want to map a euro key on the keyboard to generate the symbol I just need to be able to produce the character on screen.

I understand the comments about VT emulation being obsolete, but they said that about Cobol too - it doesn't mean there aren't thousands of businesses out there who still recognise that for data entry systems character emulation is a) adequate and b) quick. :-)

To answer the question on locale - If changed the .dtprofile to the en_GBisa...@euro but that (so far) hasn't helped.

I can't help but think that there must be a way of achieving it.

[Alex Glennie]

some thoughts ......

a) Since this 11.i euro charactersets etc should be installed/enabled more or less by default so no euro patches necessary.

b) under hpux Xwindows and using a euro enabled language ie .iso885915@euro

simply running echo"\0244" will display the euro symbol .... where did you find info about the alt 128 sequence ?

I'd be curious to know what result echo"\0244" has ?

c) the contents of the .dtprofile will only be read via a CDE Xwindows session so not relevant.

[Simon Pamplin]

Echo'ing "\0244" gives:
HP-SAUCE:simon:/home/simon> echo "\0244"
??
HP-SAUCE:simon:/home/simon>


I thought there were'nt going to be any patches required.

I recognise the Xconfig changes and .dtprofile are for X emulators - but I had to try something, desparate times etc.

Got the ALT 0128 etc from Computer Associates Tech support for Ingres when askng them the same question - their solution seems to work on Data General Unix.

[Alex Glennie]

?? is EXACTLY what I see in a dtterm when the locale is not set to say en-GB.iso885915@euro and i type echo "\0244" ..... sounds like we are getting nearer.

I guess it's time to ask : check the locale/lang settings if they are set to en-GB.iso885915@euro get in contact with the vendors of NETTEM and ask if they're vt220 emulator supports the euro under hpux and if so what we need to do to achieve it ....

[Simon Pamplin]

Starting to get good feelings about this...

This is what I get after setting the .dtprofile and the Xconfig locale (and for that matter exporting the parameter)

HP-SAUCE:simon:/home/simon> echo $LANG
en_GB.iso885915@euro
HP-SAUCE:simon:/home/simon> echo "\0244"
??
HP-SAUCE:simon:/home/simon>

Starting to look like the locale is not being initialised correctly - all we done so far is follow the instructions on the documentation CD for changing the locale.

What can I try next ?

[Alex Glennie]

I'm guessing but what's in /etc/rc.config.d/LANG ? if not C I'd try editting it to all comments and reboot I guess to see if it's contents could be putting a spanner in the works ?

[Simon Pamplin]

/etc/rc.config.d/LANG has LANG=C export LANG

What next?

[Alex Glennie]

well I've managed to reproduce your problem using Exceed 6.2 .... setting locale / lang has made no difference, looks like I can't point the emulator to an hp system to get it's fonts and i was unable to set stty to cs8 which I'm wondering might be in part our problem ... it doesn't explain why it worked on the other flavour of unix unless it's simply hpux only supports the euro symbol under Xwindows as per /usr/share/doc/euro_howto.txt .... in which case we may not be able to get this to work.

anyone else used Exceed ot Reflection clients to display a euro symbol from an hpux system via a console emulator ?

[Bill Hassell]

I probably should have asked if this was a true terminal or Xwindows. In ASCII, there are 128 symbols (man ascii) for the 7bits 00 to 7f. From 80 to ff, the characters become application-defined (in the old days, the 8th bit was parity but that's esentially obsolete). HP-UX doesn't care about these characters as they don't make up any command names.

But CDE (and other Xwindow managers) can display all sorts of bits and colors, including symbols. So the next step is figuring out where the character is being generated. This isn't as simple as it sounds. In 'local' CDE, you click on a terminal but you're really running an emulator such as dtterm and dtterm gets it's fonts and mapping from the CDE environment. So with the Xwindow patches for Euro symbol, using the appropriate locale and/or language and character will display a Euro symbol.

However, Exceed or Reflection/X add another very sticky part to this task. They don't run CDE, they emulate an Xterminal so it is a 'remote' CDE. Similarly, if you start a remote dtterm and redisplay it on a PC, the appearance is dependent on the local emulator software, specifically the character generator code.

So, I would modify the PC emulator to use a font server (the HP system) and then start the font server on the HP system. You can do this by editing /etc/rc.config.d/xfs and setting RUN_X_FONT_SERVER to a non-zero value. Then start the server with:

/sbin/init.d/xfs start

This will avoid all font availability issues when running apps on HP-UX and displaying them on a PC.