# Using European character sets

### 0. Do you need to read this ?

If you are using Arachne only to read web pages in English language, and/or to send and receive eMails written in English, you are very lucky - you don't have to worry about this stuff.

### 1. Fonts

Basic font sets for Arachne are available as Arachne Packages. There are three basic packages available: ISO-8859-1 (USA, Western Europe), ISO-8859-2 (Central Europe) and Windows-1251 (Cyrillic). Alternative packages with CP-895 (prefered Czech encoding for MS-DOS) and KOI-8-R (Cyrillic) are available too.

You can create your own fonts set from Windows TTF fonts using TTF2FNT utility.

### 2. Keyboard

You can use any DOS keyboard driver you wish, but you must tell Arachne which ISO-8859-x (or Windows-12xx...) characters should be displayed after typing accented letters on your keyboard.

This is very easy - just fill translation table on Options | Local settings screen:
1. Turn on your TSR keyboard driver (from DOS command line)
2. Install requested font set to Arachne.
3. Deactivate any existing keyboard map and restart Arachne.
4. Press corresponding key for each accented letter you have on your keyboard. Important: you shouldn't see correct characters in input field! If you see them, it means that you don't have to use keyboard map!
5. Press any dummy key (eg. dot - '.') for each unused accented letter.
6. Save and activate new keyboard map and then restart Arachne.

### 3. Getting correct charset

Properly configured web server will send you document in your local charset, if browser sends HTTP keyword "Accept-charset". APM packages configure this keyword automaticaly, but you can check it at Options | Local settings screen.

### 4. Receiving eMails

All "Content-type:" lines in MIME headers are converted to <META HTTP-EQIV="Content-type" ...> tags - see paragraph 6 below. Of course, for most e-mails you won't need any conversion tables, because ISO-Latin-1 and ISO-Latin-2 encodings are standards for Internet e-mail exchage, and they are (more or less) accepted even by Microsoft.

### 5. Sending eMails

You have to use either 8bit or quted-printable encoding (see Options | Network settings) for outgoing e-mail, and you have also to specify your character set correctly (see Options | Local settings).

### 6. <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" ...> tag

Yes. You need just 256bytes long translation table to your current character set (these tables are included in APM packages). And luckily, Microsoft FrontPage is able to automaticaly insert this tag to HTML pages! Example:

`<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=X">`

X | Arachne will read conversion table from file `windows-1250` | `SYSTEM\CODEPAGE\1250.cp`
--- | ---
`iso-8859-2` | `SYSTEM\CODEPAGE\8859-2.cp`
etc.

### 7. Printing

For ASCII printing, you can configure some additional encoding filter to your MIME.CFG file - lines file/print.dgi and file/printcom.dgi. PostScript printing of ISO-Latin-1 and ISO-Latin-2 documets is not yet implemented, but it seems that there exists some solution.

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