Keyboard: Problems with German Umlauts: ?. ?, ? ...

[Oliver Fromme]

Joerg Anslik <joerg at xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
 > [...]
 > > The LANG and MM_CHARSET environment variables  appear to be essential. 

No.

 > Yeah, I set (along with the kernel conf entries mentioned) the "LANG"
 > environment variable to "de_DE.ISO8859-15". That's all to it (no
 > additional rc.conf stuff, etc.).

Personally, I prefer (and recommend) to set only LC_CTYPE,
and not to use LANG or LC_ALL (defaulting to C / POSIX).

The problem is that setting LANG also affects things like
date formats (LC_TIME) and others.  I've come across shell
scripts that try to parse the output from "date", "ls" and
other commands, and which got quite confused when the date
was "Di 21 Dez" instead of "Tue Dec 21", and things like
that ...

I agree that such scripts are broken, but they do exist, so
to avoid the problem alltogether is not to set LC_ALL or
LANG.  Of course, you might be lucky so it doesn't affect
you at all.

In order to define the local character set (e.g. for Latin9
a.k.a. ISO8859-15), it is sufficient to set LC_CTYPE.

Just my 2 Euro cents.  YMMV.

Best regards
   Oliver

PS:  As far as MM_CHARSET is concerned -- I've never set
that variable.  It doesn't seem to be used by any of the
locale functions.  Maybe it's a proprietary variable of
some program which doesn't want to use the standard locale
functions.

-- 
Oliver Fromme, Konrad-Celtis-Str. 72, 81369 Munich, Germany

``All that we see or seem is just a dream within a dream.''
(E. A. Poe)