Debian Euro HOWTO
Chapter 6 - About this document

6.1 Why this document?

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.

6.2 References

The following documents complement this one and are useful for the reader to learn more information regarding the euro, Internationalisation and Unicode:

• Euro-mini-HOWTO.

• 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...)

• UTF-8 in Debian

• Unicode Mutt

• Unicode in X-Windows.

Some other (official) references:

• European Comission guidelines.

• Migration to Euro document produced by the European Comission.

6.3 Changelog/History

List of changes done to this document.

• Changes in 1.2
  • Fixed information on muttrc (closing bug #185751 as reported by Marco d'Itri).
  • Fixed information on Perl (closing bug #185752 as reported by Marco d'Itri).

• Changes in 1.1
  • Fixed a reference to Linuxdoc
  • Fixed typos with a patch contributed by Tommaso Moroni.

• Changes in 1.0
  • Fixed some typos
  • Renamed woody references to 3.0
  • Added a FAQ item regarding the X keyboard extensions (bug in woody)
  • Updated groff information thanks to jrfern.
  • Changed location of symbols to the proper place (/etc and not /usr/lib/X11)
  • Added reference to know bugs in woody regarding the euro in X (mostly related to the GB layout).
  • Removed a 404 link.

• Changes in 0.92
  • Updated debiandocsgml information.
  • Partially applied patch sent by jrfern (more later).
  • Added information regarding tgif provided by J.I. van Hemert to close Bug #143054.

• Changes in 0.91
  • Updated KDE information including pointers to two bug reports
  • Updated LyX info (it is not euro-compliant)
  • Added Perl to the list of software not euro-compliant (but?)

• Changes in 0.9
  • Added emacs 21 note
  • Removed repeated chapter (Why all this fuss...? and Why this document?)
  • Added information on user-euro-es
  • Changed from currency to EuroSign (under discussion)
  • Major rewritting of Xfree section in order to distinguish xfree versions properly (currency and EuroSign symbol)
  • Rewriting of Locale section to separate woody and potato information

• Changes in 0.8
  • added note regarding tetex-eurosym on stable sent by Martin Schulze
  • fixed HTML representation, suggested by Bernd Eckenfels
  • added a note regarding the use of kbdconfig, suggested by Bernd Eckenfels
  • added an acknowledgment to Guylhem Aznar
  • fixed missing quote, sent by Cyrille Artho

• Changes in 0.7
  • proofreading and slight reorganization by Josip Rodin

• Changes in 0.6
  • fixed grammar errors with patch sent by Matt Kraai

• Changes in 0.5
  • Added contributions from Juan Rafael Fernández, Miguel Sanjuan, Aurelien Jano, Phillip Siegert, Tomohiro Kubota, Ionel Mugurel and Alexander Steinert.
  • Moved the location of the explanations regarding fonty.
  • Rewrote the presentacion of supported applications to improve readability.
  • Rewrote acknowledgments (I'm getting kind of sentimental :)

• Changes in 0.4
  • Added contributions submitted by Juan Rafael Fernández.
  • Fixed a few typos spotted by Carlos Valdivia.
  • Added more information on the euro-support package.

• Changes in 0.3
  • Added information regarding LaTeX provided by Juan Rafael Fernández
  • Added more information and fixes contributed by Eduard Bloch.

• Changes in 0.2
  • added more information regarding euro standards
  • added links to mailing list threads
  • fixed some typos

6.4 Pending issues

This is a list of pending issues that some readers have sent and should be looked upon and documented appropriately:

• Modify the section related to TeX, LaTeX and the LyX frontend. Input/output issues are mixed, and use of latin0 with euro might not be the same issues (jrfern)

• talk about how to change fonts and the prefered way on howto register a font in woody: defoma (make a howto, as a user I only execute type1inst and mkfontdir) (jrfern)

• It seems that locales *@euro, ispell and all the programs which call it (emacs, mc..) need -t latin1 to work properly. Check. (jrfern)

6.5 Acknowledgements

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 (jrfern), who wrote a first draft of a euro-howto in Spanish. He has also contributed quiet a number of typos and suggestions in order to improve this document.

• 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.

• Guylhem Aznar the writer of the Euro Pack and the Euro FAQ. Presented in a Linux Journal article in 1998.

• Eduard Bloch, the writer of the DE-Debian-HOWTO.

• 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.

Debian Euro HOWTO