Unicode

General

Unicode fonts

'Fonts for Windows' are in fact TTF fonts. And the Debian font section.

UTF-8 on the console

Some info on running UTF-8 on the console

Apache and Unicode

The best way to tell a browser that a file is UTF-8 is by putting the charset in the http response header; 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 14:28:20 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) Debian GNU/Linux PHP/4.1.2
Last-Modified: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 10:01:13 GMT
ETag: "2a0c0-1441-411b3fe9"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 5185
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
This can be achieved in several ways;

Single file

For this you need a meta file, File_Name.meta for each UTF-8 document. Meta files default reside in a '.web' subdirectory. The location of the meta files can be set in the httpd config file. The example below enables meta files and sets the meta file directory to '.'; 
MetaFiles on

#MetaDir .web
MetaDir .

# MetaSuffix: specifies the file name suffix for the file containing the
# meta information.
MetaSuffix .meta
You also need to enable meta files by loading the Cern Meta module. Eg; 
LoadModule cern_meta_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/mod_cern_meta.so
Each meta file should contain the following line; 
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Unless it is a text file, in which case it should say; 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Directory (tree)

For this you need a '.htaccess' file. Htaccess files should be enabled in your config. Eg; 
AccessFileName .htaccess

#AllowOverride None
AllowOverride FileInfo
The '.htaccess file should contain the following line; 
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Alias

For this you just set the charset alias wide; 
<Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin/utf>
AllowOverride None
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Directory>

Global

Just put a 'AddDefaultCharset UTF-8' in your global config.

Debian

Pine

There is an Unicode enabled version of pine called Alpine. It can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/alpine/

Debian supplies a package.

Replacing aspell with this script below makes the spell check multi lingual; 

#!/bin/bash

echo -e "Select language:\n"
select name in EN NL DE FR
do
	if [ $REPLY = 2 ] || [ $REPLY = "N" ] || [ $REPLY = "n" ]
	then
		aspell -l nl_NL.UTF-8 -H -c ${1}
		break
	elif [ $REPLY = 3 ] || [ $REPLY = "D" ] || [ $REPLY = "d" ]
	then
		aspell -l de_DE.UTF-8 -H -c ${1}
		break
	elif [ $REPLY = 4 ] || [ $REPLY = "F" ] || [ $REPLY = "f" ]
	then
		aspell -l fr_FR.UTF-8 -H -c ${1}
		break
	else
		aspell -H -c ${1}
		break
	fi
done
On my box en_GB.UTF-8 is the default. '-H' keeps aspell from nagging about HTML tags. Adapt this to suit your needs.

Samba

Put the following line in your smb.conf; 
   unix charset = UTF-8

Mounting smb

If your kernel does support cifs, mount using cifs rather then smbfs and add the following mount option; 
,iocharset=utf8
If your kernel does not support cifs, use smbfs add the following mount options; 
,iocharset=utf8,codepage=cp850
This of course means that only glyphs in CP-850 are supported.

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