10.10.3: Non-English characters

Gri supports both English and some other European-derived languages, permitting text with accents on letters. (It does not support Oriental or other languages at this time.) The accents are supported by using the so-called ISO-Latin-1 font-encoding scheme (also called the ISO-8859-1 scheme), and so, from what the author can gather from his reading, Gri should support various languages from western European, e.g. English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese, Italian, Albanian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Faroese, Icelandic, Irish, Scottish, and as well as Afrikaans and Swahili.

Gri uses the ISO-Latin-1 font encodings by default, although the so-called `standard' font-encoding may also be selected with the `Set Font Encoding' command (see Set Font Encoding). For more on font encodings see any book on PostScript fonts ... although the bottom line is that if you are using accented characters in your work, then you probably already know about encodings, and if you don't use accents then you needn't learn about this topic except for the pleasure of learning about other languages.

The method of handling accented characters is very simple. If you can type it, Gri can draw it! It is up to you to determine how to enter the accents. Most text editors permit this. Since many users will prefer the Emacs editor, a few words about that are in order.

For complete information about entering iso-latin-1 characters in Emacs, consult your Emacs manual in the section `(emacs)Single-Byte Character Support' which describes the available methods suitable for the Emacs version you are using. A few examples are nevertheless provided below.

Consider the task of inserting French text, with the Emacs text-editor. There are several ways of doing this (and you may wish to consult your emacs info manual). A method that works in emacs-19 up to current emacs-20 versions uses the emacs `iso-transl.el' package by putting the following in your `~/.emacs' file:

(require 'iso-transl) (iso-transl-set-language "French") (standard-display-european t)

Loading the iso-transl package defines three ways of entering the non-ASCII printable characters with codes above 127: the prefix `C-x 8', or the `Alt' key, or a dead accent key. For example, you can enter uppercase A-umlaut as `C-x 8 " A' or `Alt-" A' (if you have an Alt key) or `umlaut A' (if you have an umlaut/diaeresis key).

A more recently introduced method is to enter the mode which allows quick insertion of iso-latin-1 characters. Do the Emacs command `M-x iso-accents-mode' (either manually, or in a hook that's done automatically). Now, suppose the x-axis is to represent temperature. All you'd have to do is type in the command

set x name "Temp'erature"

As you type, the quote mark will dissappear, and reappear as an accent on the `e'. And then, Gri will recognize this accented `é', and it will draw the accent on the axis label.

Perhaps the future default way of accomplishing this task is to use MULE support directly. First, customize MULE using `M-x customize-group RET mule' setting the `current language environment' (e.g. latin-1) and the `default input method' (e.g. latin-1-prefix). Then, invoking `M-x toggle-input-method' (e.g. `C-\') toggles into a mode similar to the `iso-accents-mode' minor-mode described above.