Re: Italian Input?

[David Santinoli <u235@example.com>]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 07:41:12PM +0900, Shigeo Honda wrote:
> Does anyone know how to handle Italian characters? Do I have to install
> italian fonts? 
The only difficulty that can arise with Italian is related to "true" accented
characters, like à é è ò. You may want to use the "composite input" method, by
which, for example, "à" is created by first typing COMPOSE + 'a' and then the
'grave accent' (or COMPOSE + 'grave accent' and then 'a'). Note that this might
require a bit of hacking to the X configuration to let it know about the key
used for the COMPOSE function (Windows keys do great ;-). You need to have
some ISO-8859-1 (aka latin1) font as well - or, if you prefer, the more recent
ISO-8859-15 (latin9) which includes the mighty Euro currency symbol ;-)
Don't forget to set the "charset" of your outgoing mail to "iso-8859-1" if you
plan to send messages using accented letters (have a look at this mail's
headers).

An alternative (and more practical) approach is to write accented characters in
an ASCII-only fashion: a` instead of à, e' instead of é etc.
This way you don't have to mess with foreign charsets and the COMPOSE stuff at
all; the ASCII set is enough (apart from the currency symbols - but who cares
anyway?), which means that no changes are required to your existing setup.

Cheers,
 David