Even if you have the euro symbol working correctly (you can input it from the
keyboard and see it on your screen) you still need to see if your applications
work properly.
Some problems here arise in graphic applications which might use their own
fonts and might, therefore, be unable to represent the euro symbol (even if you
input it correctly) because they do not have an internal representation for it.
Hint: you could make your life easier if you run a font selector program like
gtkfontsel (gtkfontsel package) and you set the mask
of visible fonts to ISO-8859-15.
However, the encoding made by the program for texts and data that it uses is
also an important issue. If it's unable to represent internally the charset
used (be it ISO-8859-15 or Unicode) support for euro might not fully work. So,
one thing is using ISO-8859-15 for menubars, program messages et al, and a
different one is using ISO-8859-15 for data used by the program (text,
information on databases...).
The following applications are known to have support for the euro character:
Terminals: XTerm, Rxvt and their derivatives, GNOME Terminal, Eterm.
Editors: gVim, Emacs, XEmacs, Kword, Mcedit, kedit, kwite, kwrite. Note:
Emacs21 (in woody) does support latin9 documents.
Programs using GTK+/GLib
Desktop environments: GNOME and KDE.
Konqueror, Mozilla
Mutt
Apache
LaTeX
groff (nroff, troff, grotty)
a2ps
Staroffice 5.0 (not provided in Debian but a FAQ) it seems to use it own fonts,
so you cannot use the locally installed fonts, however it seems the 'Conga'
font does include the euro-character.
If the euro character is not represented in your X terminal emulator, you can
change the default font by changing either the users' configuration files
(.Xdefaults or .Xresources) or the system-wide
configuration at /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm:
Rxvt and the programs derived from it (e.g. Aterm, Wterm) also use the
font resource from ~/.Xresources or
~/.Xdefaults, see above for how it's done in XTerm.
Change the user configuration (~/.Eterm/user.cfg) with:
<Eterm-0.9.1>
begin attributes
scrollbar_type motif
scrollbar_width 10
font default 2
font proportional 0
font 0 -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-80-*-*-m-*-iso8859-15
font 1 -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-m-*-iso8859-15
font 2 -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-m-*-iso8859-15
font 3 -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-140-*-*-m-*-iso8859-15
font 4 -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-180-*-*-m-*-iso8859-15
end attributes
GNU Emacs 21 and XEmacs 21 provide support for latin9. However, in versions
previous to Emacs21, (Mule) does not show an option to save documents using
latin9 (latin0) or ISO-8859-15.
You might need, however, to change the font that Emacs runs with in order to
present the Euro character in X windows. To do so, run emacs with a euro font
with the -fn switch or configure it to always use a given font by editing
~/.Xresources:
Gnome applications do mostly support another charset without problems.
Depending on your local configuration, you probably would have to change the
default font. Please start (in Gnome) the Control Center and choose a font
with iso8859-15 encoding. If you don't have gnomecc installed,
you could make this setting manually, creating an customised gtkrc file in your
home directory (~/.gtkrc) and addind the lines show below.
Better yet, change the systemwide GTK+ settings in /etc/gtk/gtkrc.
You can do this in two different ways:
Linking (or copying) /etc/gtk/gtkrc.iso-8859-15 to
/etc/gtk/gtkrc (recommended). In Debian this file contains:
Be careful when setting the locale and use the aliases defined in the X library
since, as described at http://bugs.kde.org/db/32/32919-b.html,
setting the charset as 'ISO-8859-15' will not work, it needs to be
'ISO8859-15'. This issue is further discussed at Localisation issues, Section 3.2.
Once this is done, you have to go to KDE's Control
Center::Personalization::Country & Language. And set your Country name and
"Charset: iso8859-15".
I first though, reading http://users.pandora.be/sim/euro/112/
that KDE didn't work with Euro characters. But you only have to configure it
properly. You can see it for
yourself. If it does not work for you check your charset and the
fonts available.
However, there are know bugs due to the localesconf which does not
set the KDE environment properly. You should take your time and read Bug
122533. and Bug
130259.
You should modify your webserver settings if you want to present some sites
with a non-ISO8859-1 charset, unless you want your users to change their
charset manually each time. Following settings for Apache (eg. put into an
.htaccess file) tells the browsers the charset they have to use:
AddType text/html;charset=ISO-8859-15 html
You can use the euro character directly in the documents, this information
could be provided also in the HTML documents DTD. In any case you can use, the
HTML 4.0 euro representation and not configure Apache.
There are several ways to introduce the euro character in LaTeX:
With textcomp package and the \texteuro macro (TS1 fonts)
With the marvosym package, using type1 fonts.
With the eurosym package using metafont fonts.
Thus, you can use the marvosym package that is included in
tetex-base
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/misc/marvosym.sty). This package
includes some symbols, including the euro symbol, in different fonts (Times,
Helvetica and Courier). Of course, you do not need to be able to input the
euro character (or see it in X) since the LaTeX files will be translated into
postscript files (no font needed for their viewing with xpdf or
other postscript viewers). The include it in your documents with
\EUR
Debian woody has also the tetex-eurosym package which allows the
euro representation too. You can use this package even if on a pure stable
system to reproduce Euro symbols.
\texteuro
In order to represent the cent you need to use textcomp.sty which
is provided in tetex-base.
A common problem is, however, not having an input encoding in order to include
this characters directly. You can use, however the files provided at File definitions for LaTeX, Appendix A, and place
them under /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/ in order to do so.
FIXME: Wishlist bug against tetex-base so they get included.
Kword includes a document in the demos directory called
eurosign.kwd which can be used to determine if fonts are properly
installed. It is available at
/usr/share/doc/kword/examples/eurosign.kwd.gz
Note: This file was available since Kword 1.1.1-5, see #132627.
The following applications (and associated versions) have been reported
not to work with the euro character:
LyX 1.1.6fix3. ISO-8859-15 is not included in
/usr/share/lyx/encodings and /usr/share/lyx/languages
shows ISO8859-1 for euro-zone languages (for example, for Spanish). Problems
with LyX are similar to LaTeX, there is a need for a new inputenc.
Check, however File definitions for LaTeX, Appendix
A, you will need, in any case type1 fonts for LaTeX to be able to print the
character properly (currently not provided).
Xfig 3.2.3
GnuPG, supports only ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, koi8-r and utf-8 (see the
--charset option in gpg(1))
SGML tools (nsgml, sgml-tools and
debiandoc-sgml. Most tools will currently warn if you are using
any @euro locale, the nsgmls has currently no support for the
iso-8859-15 encoding.
Perl is not euro friendly, Perl is used by quite a number of administrative
scripts including Debconf.