I (Javier) have been thinking for a time on how to provide automatic
configuration of the euro issue on the lines of the automatic stuff done by
castellanizar in user-es. After going through some
information on the problem and reading some threads in debian related mailing
lists like debian-i18n,
debian-devel
and debian-user-spanish,
I decided to post a poll to test how euro support was amongst Spanish speakers
(in
debian-user-spanish). The results indicated that many people have
not properly configured their systems even though Debian 2.2 (released more
than a year ago) was ready for the euro problem.
This document is the first step towards writing an automated tool to configure
the user system for full euro support. Even if this could be done when Debian
users move to UTF-8 there is a need of a short term solution before that move
comes about.
The following documents complement this one and are useful for the reader to
learn more information regarding the euro, Internationalisation and Unicode:
Introduction to
I18n by Tomohiro Kubota, which introduces basic concepts of
internationalization and is centered on displaying and inputting characters
with different encodings (ASCII, ISO-8859, multybyte characters...)
I would like to take the opportunity to thanks all the people have contributed
(knowingly or not) to the information contained in this HOWTO, specifically:
Juan Rafael Fernández, who wrote a first draft of a euro-howto in Spanish.
Hue-Bond, who answered himself some FAQs in the debian-user-spanish mailing
list.
Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo, who showed up some very good insights on May 9th on
the debian-users-spanish mailing list regarding this issue.
Ionel Mugurel who did an extensive explanation on the euro issues on 14th
September 2000 on the debian-i18n mailing list and provided me with the
so-much-needed LaTeX input encodings.
Tomohiro Kubota who enlightened me on some of the problems of playing with the
locale and its risks.
Pablo de Vicente, from the Spanish KDE translation team who made efforts to
prove me wrong when I said that KDE did not support the euro.
Thomas Roessler, who contributed useful input regarding the locale section and
made me separate it in two.
And of course, all other people that contributed bits of
typos/corrections/suggestions of which these HOWTO is made of. If you, reader,
have to thank someone is theirs for their effort and knowledge, I only put it
together here.