Re: [Groff] German Umlaute, ISO-8859-1, postscript.

[Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

At 08:41 a.m. 16/05/2004, Bruno Hertz wrote:
> Hi folks
>
> this may be a faq, but since an extensive web search didn't
> bring up an answer I try it here.
>
> Problem is I'm trying to get 8 bit german umlauts work with
> groff postscript output.
>
> More specifically: with environment
>  LANG=de_DE.ISO-8859-1
>  LC_CTYPE=de_DE.ISO-8859-1
> in vi I type in umlauts like ü directly into my groff source
> text file (e.g. source.txt).

[snip]

Hi Bruno,

You forgot to mention very important details, such as: (1) You operating 
system (no, saying "Linux" is not enough, go to <http://linuxiso.org/> to 
see what I mean :-); (2) the version of your vi: there are 2 different open 
source versions of vi, 4 different open source clones out there, and a 
different closed source version for each version of vendor UNIX out there. 
I'm not counting three different ELISP emulations that run in emacs :-); 
(3) Gnome is a moving target, what Gnome/GTK versions?. I'm not psychic, I 
just noticed you use Ximian Evolution...

If using vim (most probable bet is using some Linux distribution), you will 
have far better luck setting the actual file encoding yourself and making 
sure the file is written with *that* encoding. Type ':h mbyte.txt' without 
the quotes for the whole story. As well, using modelines to set the file 
character set is very useful.