EURO (ISO 8859-15 Locales)

Euro support is provided via locale support for the ISO 8859-15 character set. ISO 8859-15 is a newly ratified character set that differs from ISO 8859-1 in that it supports eight new characters. Specific enhancements are provided to allow Euro display, input, and processing capabilities.

Fourteen new locales have been created based on ISO 8859-15:

Source files for supported European locales are also being supplied.

Applications must elect to enable ISO 8859-15 support, by setting the LANG environment variable to the desired locale.

ISO 8859-15 support is part of HP-UX and is available to all platforms. ISO 8859-15 support is not automatically turned on for any application. No special configuration is required and there are no compatibility issues involved with the addition of this new feature.

Locales are installed, based on which current language file sets are already installed on a target system.

The LC_MONETARY environment variable will be set to the euro for all locales listed above except C.iso885915 and fr_CA.iso885915. Standard euro formatting rules will apply to ALL locales where this environment variable is set to the euro. As a result, users may encounter a change to the decimal and thousands separators for the currency, whereas decimal and thousands separators outside the monetary area stay the same as in previous locales.

For example, in the French locale, the thousands separator is a space and the decimal point is a comma. However, the international standard for the thousands separator for the euro currency is a period. So, a user that has the LC_MONETARY locale category set to "fr_FR.iso885915@euro" will see the following behavior:

The LC_MONETARY value can be changed by users to their national currency unit.

ISO 8859-15 support is not automatically provided in any application. Applications which use the Euro symbol must elect to enable ISO 8859-15 support, by way of setting the LANG environment variable to the desired locale. Users enable ISO 8859-15 automatically in some locales when logging in through the CDE.

For more information, please see:

http://software.hp.com/products/EURO/index.html

CDE Support

New functionality was introduced in the CDE product to support input and display of the Euro symbol. (These changes are for both the workstation and the server.)

X Window Support

New functionality was added to Xlib to support input and display of the Euro symbol. This was done by adding internal support for the ISO8859-15 character set (as well as support of UTF8 on 11i). When an Xlib application is started, Xlib internals determine if the locale is set to an ISO8859-15 character set. If it is, Xlib will perform character lookups using the eight new symbols present in the ISO8859-15 character set. Currently, only applications linked with X11R6 (X Window version X11 Release 6) will support the ISO8859-15 character set. Older X11 versions are not currently supported.

Libraries

The libc and xlib libraries support the Euro symbol.

Codeset Converters

New iconv tables exist to support conversion from/to ISO 8859-15 and ISO 8859-1, ucs2, and utf8. The additional disk space in HP-UX 11i is 6.42MB. No additional memory is required.

LaserJet Printers

An important aspect of the euro support is printing the new symbol on LaserJet printers using existing standard lp(1) model files.The ISO8859-15 font set is resident on the HP 4500 Color LaserJet Printer, which contains the Euro symbol at position A4 (hexadecimal). Your data file must contain this code to print the Euro symbol.

A new utility will be provided to download the fonts to the printer RAM. These fonts will then reside in the printer's RAM until the next power cycle.

Use the lp option -ocs9N (or -oscs9N) to select the ISO 8859-15 character set as the primary (or secondary) character set. For example:

lp -dprinter_name -ocs9N -oother_ options print_filename

	NOTE: The case is significant. Be sure to use an upper case "N".