This page describes how the Czech fonts and keybord can be installed on your system. If you are interested in how they look like, see this page (however, it will be viewed the best way when the fonts are already installed).
Even non-Czech versions of the Microsoft Windows 95, 98, NT 4, 2000 and ME should be capable of displaying Czech characters in applications, including Internet Explorer. You have to select the Central-European script in your font selection dialog box. If you want to input Czech characters with the keyboard, you have to go to the control panels Keyboard or Local Settings and add the Czech keyboard (the system may prompt you to insert the Windows Installation CD-ROM).
The Czech X fonts need to be installed in order to be able to view Czech text / HTML / other files. This involves at least three applications: Netscape, Emacs, and Xterm. Caution! Without the Czech fonts, you will see the data in the default code page, which is ISO 8859-1 (West-European languages). Since the characters in both codepages differ not only in accents but also in base letters, you will not be able to find translations of the Czech words in the dictionary.
The Czech keyboard layout should be installed to provide an input method for the Czech characters. However, several important characters are not accessible via the standard Czech keyboard, so it is necessary to allow switching back to the U.S. keyboard.
The Emacs and Xterm applications probably require additional care to let them handle 8-bit characters. It is unclear to me at the moment whether this applies only to the input method or both to the input and to viewing.
We include here a set of ISO 8859-2 fonts for X Window. These fonts are courtesy of Petr Kolář, Technical University Liberec.
You can inform your system about the location of the fonts by executing the following three commands:
xset +fp /your/path/75dpi xset +fp /your/path/100dpi xset fp rehash
For your convenience you might want to have these commands somewhere where they execute automatically each time you log in. Unfortunatelly, for some reason it does not work when the xset commands are in the .xinitrc in your home directory. It works when you add them to your .cshrc file (given you use csh or tcsh, not bash). Obviously, this is not the correct way because it runs many times unnecessarily and moreover, you can even start emacs or netscape without running csh! Then the applications probably would not know about the fonts. This must still be corrected.
You can find more fonts in ISO 8859-2 font repositories. Get more information about installing X Window fonts at this site (author: Primoz Peterlin).
Once you have the fonts installed, you can:
-font "*-iso8859-2"
and open a file with Czech text. Maybe the default font will not
be in a readable size so you might want to fully specify the font
name, for instance -font
"-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--14-100-*-iso8859-2".
If you want another font to be your default, try xlsfonts
"*-iso8859-2" to list all possibilities. You can also add
the following lines to the .Xdefaults file in your
home directory:
emacs*font: -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--14-100-*-iso8859-2 xemacs*font: -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--14-100-*-iso8859-2
-font option as described for
emacs before. Then you can, e.g., cat a file with Czech
text. Alternatively, add the following lines to the
.Xdefaults file in your home directory:
xterm*font: -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--14-100-*-iso8859-2 xterm*eightBitInput: true xterm*eightBitOutput: true
There is an emacs-library for inputting Czech characters: czech-standard-kbd.el. This keyboard additionally enables to insert U.S. characters (such as brackets, braces, dollar sign...) using the Alt key.
You will be able to switch between the Czech and the U.S. keyboards
using C-x 8/9 if you add the following lines to the
.emacs file in your home directory:
(setq load-path (cons "wherever/your/keyboard/resides" load-path)) (load-library "czech-standard-kbd.el") (standard-display-european 1) (global-set-key "\C-x8" 'load-cs-keyboard) (global-set-key "\C-x9" 'unload-cs-keyboard) (global-set-key "\C-x\C-b" 'buffer-menu) (global-set-key "\C-g" 'goto-line) (global-set-key "\M-g" 'what-line) (global-set-key [backspace] 'backward-delete-char-untabify) (global-set-key [delete] 'delete-char) (global-set-key [home] 'beginning-of-line) (global-set-key [end] 'end-of-line)
Baltimore, 1998