[Techtalk] umlauts

[Telsa Gwynne]

I am skipping the original questions because I don't know off-hand.
Sorry.

On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 09:15:50PM +0300 or thereabouts, Eeva Järvinen wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 01:09:34PM -0400, Shirrell wrote:
> > There seems to be little consistency in the way they are
> > represented on our 3 different platforms: solaris 8,
> > RedHat 8, and Windows XP .  
> > 
> > Questions:
> > (1) Can you find such a character in VI, or using GREP ?
> >     In RedHat vi the umlauts appear as the proper German
> >     characters.  In Solaris vi they appear with a back slash
> >     followed by the 3 octal numbers
> 
> Yes.  It depends on how the file is coded.  RH handles this pretty
> gracefully, because it uses Unicode.  RH vi probably decodes the file
> automatically into UTF-8, i.e. RH's preferred Unicode coding (also a
> very standard way of coding text).  I don't know how you can type
> those characters in vi, however, (but ask me about emacs... type M-x

I generate these characters in vim on RH (9, but I think this 
worked with RH 8 too) with ^K followed by two characters. For all 
of your umlauted examples, the first character is the letter and
the second character is a ":" mark.

So ^Ku: produces ü, ^Ka: produces ä, and ^Ko: produces ö.

Hit escape, hit / to start a search, and you can use the control-K,
char1 char2 thing to generate your umlauted character and then 
search for it. And keep hitting 'n' to find the next one. 

I only started using vim because it understood utf8 and my old
preferred editor didn't. I am glad vim understands utf8, because
I don't.

Other neat thing I discovered: put your cursor over one of these
accented characters and hit g then 8. It tells you something about
the character in the status line. I haven't quite worked out what
it tells you, but I am sure I shall one day :) 

> www.unicode.org for lengthier explanations.  This mail, BTW, is coded
> in UTF-8.

Mutt thinks mine is in 8859-1. How do I make it claim UTF-8, or
is that an editor issue?

Telsa