Using European character sets

0. Do you need to read this ?

If you are using Arachne only to read web pages in English and/or to send and receive e-mails written in English, you are very lucky - you don't have to worry about this stuff.

1. Fonts

Basic font sets for Arachne are available as Arachne Packages. There are three basic packages available: ISO-8859-1 (USA, Western Europe), ISO-8859-2 (Central Europe), Windows-1251 or KOI-8-R (Cyrillic), ISO-8859-8 (Hebrew).

You can create your own fonts set from Windows TTF fonts using the TTF2FNT utility.

2. Keyboard

You can use any DOS keyboard driver you wish, but you must tell Arachne which ISO-8859-x (or Windows-12xx...) characters should be displayed after typing accented letters on your keyboard.

This is very easy - just fill in the translation table on the Options | Local settings screen:
1. Turn on your TSR keyboard driver (from DOS command line)
2. Install requested font set to Arachne.
3. Deactivate any existing keyboard map and restart Arachne.
4. Press corresponding key for each accented letter you have on your keyboard. Important: you shouldn't see correct characters in the input field! If you see them, it means that you don't have to use a keyboard map!
5. Press any dummy key (e.g., dot - '.') for each unused accented letter.
6. Save and activate new keyboard map and then restart Arachne.

3. Getting the correct charset

A properly configured web server will send you the document in your local charset if the browser sends the HTTP keyword "Accept-charset". APM packages configure this keyword automaticaly but you can check it at Options | Local settings screen.

4. Receiving e-mails

All "Content-type:" lines in MIME headers are converted to <META HTTP-EQIV="Content-type" ...> tags - see paragraph 6 below. Of course, for most e-mails you won't need any conversion tables, because ISO-Latin-1 and ISO-Latin-2 encodings are standards for Internet e-mail exchange and they are (more or less) accepted even by Microsoft.

5. Sending e-mails

You have to use either 8bit or quoted-printable encoding (see Options | Network settings) for outgoing e-mail, and you also have to specify your character set correctly (see Options | Local settings).

6. <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" ...> tag

You only need a 256byte-long translation table of your current character set (these tables are included in APM packages with fonts). And fortunately, Microsoft FrontPage is able to automaticaly insert this tag into HTML pages! Some Apache modules, which convert encoding to encoding-requested- by-browser, are even able to automaticaly alter the content of this tag when sending a page. Example:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=X-Y">

X-Y Arachne will read conversion table from file
windows-1250 SYSTEM\CODEPAGE\1250.cp
iso-8859-2 SYSTEM\CODEPAGE\8859-2.cp
etc.

X-Y	Arachne will read conversion table from file
`windows-1250`	`SYSTEM\CODEPAGE\1250.cp`
`iso-8859-2`	`SYSTEM\CODEPAGE\8859-2.cp`
etc.

7. Specifying charset in HTTP header

Works the same way as <META> - see below. The syntax of the HTTP header is:

Content-type: text/html; charset=X-Y

8. Printing

For ASCII printing, you can configure some additional encoding filter in your MIME.CFG file - on lines "file/print.dgi" and "file/printcom.dgi". PostScript printing of non-ISO-Latin-1 and documents is not yet implemented, but it appears there is a solution which will be used in future.

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