The Euro symbol on FreeBSD

$FreeBSD: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/euro/article.sgml 39544 2012-09-14 17:47:48Z gabor $

$FreeBSD: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/euro/article.sgml 39544 2012-09-14 17:47:48Z gabor $

This document will try to help you in getting started with the new Euro Symbol on your new keyboard that you had to buy in early 2002 because of the switch to the new common currency. We will first focus on the more important parts like being able to correctly display the symbol on the console. Later sections will deal with configuring particular programs like X11.

Lots of helpful input came from Oliver Fromme, Tom Rhodes and countless others. Thanks! Without you this article would not have been possible!


1 The Euro in a nutshell

If you already feel comfortable with localization as described in the FreeBSD Handbook you might be only interested in the following facts which will get you started quickly:

ISO8859-15

This is a slight modification of the commonly used ISO8859-1 character map. It includes the Euro symbol. Used for the LANG, LC_CTYPE environment variables.

iso15-8x16.fnt

The vidcontrol(1) font for the console

/usr/share/syscons/keymaps/*.iso.kbd

Appropriate keyboard maps depending on your language. Set your keymap entry in rc.conf to one of these.

LC_CTYPE

Used to specify the correct character type in your locale.

XkbLayout "lang(euro)"

Xorg config option.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Be sure to adapt your X11 fonts to -*-..-*-iso8859-15