[Konsole-devel] change encoding

[Mike Maxwell]

I need to display some text with "upper ASCII" code points using simple
shell tools like 'head' and 'cat'.  The code points are not in a standard
encoding, but rather in a home-brew 8-bit encoding for a minority language.
The texts were created on an MsWindows machine, and must remain in the same
encoding.

Unfortunately, most of the upper ASCII characters do not display at all
under konsole--there's not even a question mark to indicate their presence.
Given that the encoding was user-defined, I of course cannot hope to display
them using the correct alphabetic glyphs.  But for my purposes, that's OK.
I don't speak the language anyway, so it's sufficient for me to know that
there is some character there.

I can make the chars display under a generic xterm by giving it a command
line parameter:
    xterm -e "ISO 8859-1" ...
Unfortunately,

(1) konsole doesn't have a parameter for changing encoding, or any other way
to change encoding, so far as I can tell; and

(2) xterm doesn't have some of the capabilities that I would like to use,
and 'konsole' does.  For example, 'konsole' interprets ^<LEFT> as "move left
one word".

So I seem to be stuck.  Is there some way to set the encoding which
'konsole' displays (maybe in a newer version of konsole)?  Alternatively, is
there another xterm-like app which allows me to set the encoding, and also
interprets a wider range of cursor movements from the keyboard?
(move-left-word, move-right-word, delete-word-to-left, maybe select from the
keyboard...)

I should add that keying in these special characters is not really of
interest to me (although I'm sure it is to others).  All the special chars I
need are already present in the files.

A possibly related issue is the fact that the Language Setting dlg box for
the desktop (redhat-config-language) does not allow me to choose anything
but English.  I'm not sure how to install the other language choices.
Having said that, I don't think it would solve the problem, because as I
say, the encoding I want is not going to be on anyone's list.

Version 1.2 of Konsole, KDE3.1-12 Red Hat.

BTW, I posted this previously on linux.redhat, but got no responses.  So
I'll try here.  I do notice that most of the msgs here have a bug # on their
subject line; mine doesn't, as you already know.  Should it :0?

    Mike Maxwell
    DONTmaxwellSPAM atsign ldc dot upenn dot edu