Hi Giles,

Giles Lean wrote:
> I'm working on learning German.  My handwriting is illegible even to

why would you want to learn German? ;-)
If you are interested in exchanging private email in
German, feel to contact me. =


> me, so being able to type the language is shortly going to be
> important!
> =

> How does someone with PCs with US-style keyboards go about entering
> and viewing German text?  For my purposes I'm interested in X and PCL

Well, viewing text is independent of the keyboard ;-)

less happily displays German characters if you set

LESSCHARSET=3Dlatin1

(X)Emacs likes
; display european charset properly
(standard-display-european 1)
; enable iso-accents mode "a will result in =E4
(iso-accents-mode 1)

X itself can be tweaked by using a proper xmodmap.
I use alt-graph and aouAOUs to create =E4=F6=FC=C4=D6=DC=DF.

If you need more info on this, there are several
X-Faqs out there, which describe German setup.
(Some of them are in German, though :-)

> or Postscript printing, but any tips about character sets for email
> and such would be welcome too.

Postscript (and PCL) printing should wokr right out of
the box, provided you are using a proper character/font set.

> I run NetBSD-1.4.1 typically, but also have some -current boxes.
> =

> I've worked on some internationalisation problems in the past, but one
> way or another I have always avoided the actual data entry bit
> ... time to learn. :-)

Don't know which other programs you use. Make sure you use
an 8-bit clean shell.

  Guenther