Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx ported to Win32 and charsets...

[Klaus Weide]

On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Christopher R. Maden wrote:

> [Even Holen]
> > I've just downloaded the port of Lynx for Win32 and started out to
> > test it and very soon I've discovered that this version didn't
> > respect my keyboard settings.
> > 
> > I'm living in Norway and uses a default locale of Norwegian(bokmal)
> > with Norwegian layout of keyboard. But when using Lynx it seems to
> > think that I'm using some sort of american keyboard...
> 
> What version of Windows are you using?  How did you set up your
> keyboard?  (Did it just work in Norwegian "out of the box"?)
> 
> I am using Windows 95, and in the Keyboard control panel, the language
> "English (United States)" is associated with keyboard layout "United
> States-Dvorak".  While the DOS shell does not pick that up, Lynx is
> definitely aware that I'm using a Dvorak keyboard.
> 
> What does your Keyboard control panel show for Language and General?
> (If using Windows 95 - if not, what are the applicable values from the
> NT control panel?)

For the keyboard-input side of things - this problem (or what sounded
very similar) has been reported before, and I don't think there was any
solution. 

The Lynx function for reading keyboard input, LYgetch(), translates,
*I think*, to calling wgetch() for the Win32 case. (It's a bit 
confusing to follow all the #ifdef's in that section.)  This wgetch()
in turn is a curses function.  That means that it would be provided
by whatever (n)curses-replacement library (pdcurses?) is used for the
Win32 binary.

My suspicion is that that library is somehow accessing the keyboard
driver at a too low level so that it misses any translations which
Windows does as an effect of Norwegian "layout of keyboard" or locale
settings.  I.e. it may look at raw scancodes instead of translated
characters, or something like that.

This doesn't explain why it works for Christopher with the Dvorak
keyboard.  Maybe the Dvorak keyboard setting operates at a different level
(the keyboard hardware already sends different scancodes), or maybe I am
just wrong - I'm only guessing after all.

Maybe someone could experiment with loading a good old DOS KEYB driver
(in a batch file?) before starting lynx, istead of relying on Windows.

It would help to know whether *any* user in such a non-English setting
(with Latin script, but some of the letter keys switched) has Lynx working
correctly.  We don't know wheter these problems happen only to some users
or to all such users.

> > In addition to this it doesn't display iso-8859-1 characters
> > properly.  (This I guess is rather a problem with the
> > console-windows then with Lynx...) I tried changing (using the
> > options menu) to display PC character set, but that didn't function
> > well enough. The ø (as a html entity) was displayed as the
> > cent sign. And the Ø was displayed as the Yen sign.
> > 
> > A rephrase of the last one is that I want to be able to pick/use
> > fonts which correctly display iso-8859-1! (Or which converts to the
> > appropriate Windows font) Generally some of the monospace TrueType
> > fonts will do. (Right now I'm using FixedSys and/or Courier New
> > (both with subsetting Western) in my telnet session, and it displays
> > iso-8859-1 correctly...)
> 
> You can't really switch fonts in DOS (well, you can sort of, but not
> character sets); you're stuck with the IBM code page for your locale.
> What did you set your "display (C)haracter set" to in the (o)ptions
> page?  I'm using "IBM PC character set", and all of the lower-case
> accented characters are displayed correctly.  Ø and ø,
> unfortunately, are not part of the US IBM character set.  Lynx
> approximates ø with a phi, and Ø as a capital O.
> 
> Does Norwegian DOS use a different codepage?  (I would hope so, for
> the slashed O.)  Lynx probably needs some minor work to support that
> code page.  Klaus?

Wayne had some notes on using codepage 850 (he was recommending it), but I
couldn't find them now at http://www.fdisk.com/.  Anyway, that CP 850
contains all the ISO-8859-1 characters.  And it has Ø and ø
just in the positions where CP 437 ("US IBM character set") has ¥
and ¢.  So it seems that this would be the right Display Character
Set to use - at least as far as these two characters are concerned.

Why that is so, I cannot really fathom.  There are probably ways to "load
a copde page" for this mode of operation in Windows 95 so that it becomes
less incompatible with the rest of Windows 95.  A few people may even
know them.

       Klaus

    


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