Hello. I'm using Debian 3.1 in an, until recently, regularly updated system, in Germany.
I am desperately trying to make bash (or xterm or konsole using bash) display an "acute" (034, b54 or so) character. In ancient times, one could display such a character using the acute key, and then the space key (with keyboard layout with so called "dead keys", nowadays "basic") or just the acute key (with keyboard layout "nodeadkeys"). Obviously, those people who could not distinguish the acute from the apostrophe made many other people work out solutions to help them avoid typing an "acute" when they wanted an "apostrophe". But now, this has probably gone too far: I just noticed that whenever I try to enter a plain "acute" (not sitting on top of a vowel or so) now, either nothing or an apostrophe is displayed instead. Even when I switch to English keyboard layout, an apostrophe appears when I press the acute key. If I use charmap or whatever to copy and paste the "acute" sign from any source into xterm or konsole, either nothing appears, or an apostrope character appears. If I switch over to the text mode terminal, there's no difference between the two characters any more either. The best I could achieve was to get an acute character into a text file using kedit (and even getting there was an Odyssey). I saved the resulting file as a shell script. But when bash was told to execute that, it complained and displayed questionmarks instead of acutes instead. Very funny. I'm totally annoyed by this thing. Seeing that apostrophe appear when I type an acute gives me the feeling of a sting in the back of my head in the meantime, and I've considered using physical violence against the keyboard and screen, something that's really rare for me, and might be quite an expensive and ineffective approach as well. Until here, I've read a couple of pages on how to enter special characters, and on acute apostrophic history and underlying considerations, but apparently, the character is not just mis- translated when it's being entered, but when it's being displayed or interpreted. I would prefer my keyboard work in the way that the things that appear on the screen match the things printed onto the keys first. I don't want to have to dig into manuals, patch files or whatever just to get some plain straightforward function back that has been lost in the process of some system update. And I don't want two different keys regularly produce the same character, just because someone thinks that another character might be obsolete. What will we save next, maybe simplify y and z just because some German users don't know that an English BIOS asking for "y" wants you to press the "z" key before the German keyboard drivers are loaded, and the "z" is rarely required anyway? As I'm quite fed up with looking around for more information on something that obviously worked before, and I don't have the energy to keep myself up to date with everything going on in the "supposedly improving character handling" field, I would very much appreciate somebody telling me what's going on here, and what would be a quick and reliably working way to get the ability back to enter and display and interpret an acute character in the bash. I'm overly tired now, and I've spent more than hour in vain to get that character working in the most simple way it should, to no avail - sorry for being somewhat disappointed and showing that around maybe a bit too much. Thank you very much for any help in advance, though. Joerg -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. med. Jörg M. Sigle http://www.ql-recorder.com +49-5527-846-535 http://www.jsigle.com Have a lovely day... +49-7043-950-6864
