help-request : font problem (?)

[Jacek Konieczny]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2002 at 08:14:52PM -0400, Jesse L Farinacci wrote:
> hello, i am a student at the university of buffalo and am currently
> enjoying my second semester studying the polish language.  i am also
> studying computer science.  recently i've had the desire to put all of
> my notes online for others to print out and to use to help them (and
> me as well) study and hopefully learn faster.  unfortunately, i do not
> know how i can begin to even type in my notes making sure that i put
> in all the correct diacritical marks such as   o'  n'  z,  a,  e,
> etc, etc.

The standard for encoding opolish diacritical characters is ISO-8859-2.
So you will probably need ISO8859-2 fonts. Unicode could be used as well.
The second thing is a polish keyboard. We don't use any special keyboard
here in Polan. We just use regular US keyborad. The most popular layout
used is "polish-programmers". All latin letters, and other symbols on
keyboard are typed normally, and Polish characters are typed pressing 
AltGR (or Meta, or whatever you call it) key with some latin letter.

c' is AltGR+c
n' is AltGR+n
and so on...

The only exception is z', which is typed as AltGR+x

If you are using PLD Linux Distribution (this list is for users of it),
you just have to enter:
CONSOLEFONT=lat2u-16
CONSOLEMAP=8859-2
KEYTABLE=pl1
into your /etc/sysconfig/console file and:
LC_CTYPE=pl_PL
int your /etc/sysconfig/i18n file to use Polish characters on text
console.
For X11R6 application you will probably need to configure some of them
to user ISO8859-2 fonts (most of X11 applications should configure this
automatically using LC_CTYPE locale setting). You may also need to
configure polish keyboard layout for XFree86. This can be done by
following entries in your XF86Config file:

    Option      "XkbLayout"     "pl"
    Option      "XkbVariant"    "nodeadkeys"

> i understand that this is probably not the best place to be going for
> help, but i honestly have been searching quite a bit for the past few
> weeks looking under every rock i can think to give a name to.  maybe
> i'm just not thinking about the problem correctly and so am not able
> to give appropriate keywords into google.  anyhow, i would appreciate
> any help that you would be able to give me.

I hope this helps you a bit.

Greets,
        Jacek