To utilize non-English characters on Harper using a terminal emulator you will need to enable a different character set. Harper supports the following character sets: POSIX, th_TH, th_TH.TIS620, common, en_US.UTF-8, C, iso_8859_1, iso_8859_15, en_CA, en_CA.ISO8859-1, en_US, en_US.ISO8859-1, en_US.ISO8859-15, en_US.ISO8859-15@euro, fr_CA, fr_CA.ISO8859-1, fr, fr_BE, fr_CH, fr_FR, fr_FR.ISO8859-1 and th. en_US, UTF-8 is by far the most comprehensive character set, but because of difficulties with Harper's particular configuration it will not be addressed in this document. For most people the en_US.ISO8859-1 is sufficient. The purpose of this document is not large in scope. Basically a HowTo use ISO8859. If you want more information on Unicode or ISO in general please read more about those topics.
ISO-8859 is character similar to the most popular character set in the United States (ASCII). It has a slightly different set of characters which include many of the characters used in European languages, such as accented characters. So what does this mean to you? Using ISO-8859 you will able to read and write non-English characters in your terminal emulator. To enable this functionality with a Harper terminal session you will have to change you language environment variable. There are two ways to accomplish this. First you can type the command setenv LANG en_us.ISO8859-1. That command is case sensitive. If you don't want to do that every time you login to Harper you can put that command in your .login. The .login is a file of that exact name in your home directory that executes command when you login. Simply add that command to your .login and you're done. There are many text editors available on Harper to accomplish this. In the following example pico will be used.
Type pico ~/.login. This will bring you into the pico editor. Move your cursor to the bottom of the file using the down arrow. Type setenv LANG en_us.ISO8859-1. Then hold down the control key while typing x. When prompted to Save type y. When prompted for a File name simply hit return or enter.
Additionally if you which to add this functionality to any particular program on Harper you will need to consult documentation on that specific program. Because of its relative popularity this document will discuss implementation in pine. In pine, enter Setup by typing s. Then enter Config by typing c. Scroll down to the entry called character-set. Select Change Val by typing c Enter ISO-8859-1 then hit the return/enter key. You can now Exit Setup by typing e and type y when you are prompted to Commit changes.
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