euro(5) File Formats Manual euro(5)
NAME
euro, Euro, EUR - Euro currency sign
DESCRIPTION
The Euro currency is the new currency for European countries belonging to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Euro currency is scheduled
for introduction on January 1, 1999. By the end of 2002, the new currency should completely replace local currencies for EMU member coun-
tries.
The Euro currency has its own euro currency sign, which looks like an equal sign (=) superimposed on the capital letter C. Most character
sets do not support this sign. Note that the string EUR can be prepended before monetary amounts in Euro currency in the same way USD is
sometimes used to specify U. S. dollars in certain kinds of financial reports. However, for the euro character itself, the string C= is the
closest representation that most of the current character sets support and this approximation is not appropriate for some applications.
Several character sets have been updated or invented to include the euro character. Among these are: Unicode Version 2.1 ISO/IEC 8859-15
(Latin-9) Certain DOS and Microsoft code pages
The following table specifies the encoding position of the euro character in each of these character sets:
--------------------------------------------
Character Set Euro Position
--------------------------------------------
Unicode Version 2.1 0x20AC
ISO/IEC 8859-15 (Latin-9) 0xA4
CP1250 (Windows Latin-2) 0x80
CP1251 (Windows Cyrillic) 0x88
CP1252 (Windows Latin-1) 0x80
CP1253 (Windows Greek) 0x80
CP1254 (Windows Turkish) 0x80
CP1255 (Windows Hebrew) 0x80
CP1256 (Windows Arabic) 0x80
CP1257 (Windows Baltic) 0x80
CP1258 (Windows Vietnamese) 0x80
CP874 (DOS Thai) 0x80
--------------------------------------------
Locales That Support the Euro Character
Tru64 UNIX locales that support the euro character use either the UTF-8 or ISO 8859-15 codeset. The following table lists these locales by
language and country: ca_ES.UTF-8, ca_ES.ISO8859-15 da_DK.UTF-8, da_DK.ISO8859-15 nl_NL.UTF-8, nl_NL.ISO8859-15 de_DE.UTF-8,
de_DE.ISO8859-15 de_CH.UTF-8, de_CH.ISO8859-15 en_GB.UTF-8, en_GB.ISO8859-15 en_EU.UTF-8@euro (This is a special-purpose locale that is
explained following the list.) en_US.UTF-8, en_US.UTF-8@euro, en_US.ISO8859-15 fi_FI.UTF-8, fi_FI.ISO8859-15 nl_BE.UTF-8, nl_BE.ISO8859-15
fr_BE.UTF-8, fr_BE.ISO8859-15 fr_CA.UTF-8, fr_CA.ISO8859-15 fr_FR.UTF-8, fr_FR.ISO8859-15 fr_CH.UTF-8, fr_CH.ISO8859-15 is_IS.UTF-8,
is_IS.ISO8859-15 it_IT.UTF-8, it_IT.ISO8859-15 no_NO.UTF-8, no_NO.ISO8859-15 pt_PT.UTF-8, pt_PT.ISO8859-15 es_ES.UTF-8, ds_ES.ISO8859-15
sv_SE.UTF-8, sv_SE.ISO8859-15
CDE users can select locales by using the Language menu at session login time and selecting languages whose names are followed by "(Uni-
code)." Alternatively, users can set the LANG environment variable to one of the locales in a terminal emulation window. The Latin-9
locales can be set in a terminal emulation window. When set in a terminal emulation window, the locale setting applies to child applica-
tions subsequently invoked from that window.
The @euro locale variants provide LC_MONETARY definitions for the euro character and are intended for assignment specifically to the
LC_MONETARY locale variable. In these locales, the local currency sign is defined to be the euro character and the international currency
sign is defined to be EUR. The en_US.UTF-8@euro locale defines the radix point to be the period (.) and the thousands separator to be the
comma (,). The en_EU.UTF-8@euro locale reverses these character assignments; the radix point is a comma(,) and the thousands separator is a
period (.). Because en_EU.UTF-8@euro is intended for assignment only to LC_MONETARY, the locale is useful for languages other than English.
For example, support for the euro character in Germany can be obtained by setting LANG to de_DE.UTF-8 and LC_MONETARY to en_EU.UTF-8@euro.
Note
The LC_ALL environment variable overrides settings of all locale category variables, such as LC_MONETARY. When setting LC_MONETARY to be
different from settings for the remainder of locale categories, be sure to use the LANG, not the LC_ALL, environment variable.
Applications that currently assume that one character of data is represented by one byte of data in file code can more easily support the
euro character by running in a locale rather than a locale. Because UTF-8 is basically a multibyte character encoding format, programmers
cannot assume that one character is equal to one byte of input data. To run in a locale, applications should use functions that handle
multibyte and wide-character data rather than older functions that operate only on single-byte characters. For more information on this
topic, see Writing Software for the International Market. For more information about UTF-8 and UCS-4 encoding formats, see Unicode(5)
Codeset Converters That Support the Euro Character
Codeset converters are available to convert data between encoding formats that support the euro character. Codeset converters can convert
file data between the following formats: Unicode encoding formats and the 874 and 125* codepages Unicode encoding formats and ISO 8859-15
(Latin-9)
For more information about these codeset converters, see iconv_intro(5), Unicode(5), code_page(5), and iso8859-15(5).
Keyboard Entry of the Euro Character
Depending on locale setting and keyboard style, you can use particular key sequences to enter the euro character.
When using a or locale and a keyboard that supports the Compose-character entry method, you can use the Compose key input method to enter
the euro character. For Compose-key input, you press and release certain keys in sequence, starting with the key defined as the Compose
key. For the euro character, use one of the following two sequences: Compose C = Compose = C
The following table lists more efficient key sequences that are supported for specific languages and keyboard styles. Note that the key
sequences in the table are supported only by xkb format keymaps (which are the default for CDE users). When using these key sequences, you
hold down the first key while pressing the other.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Keymap Description VT-Style Keyboard PC-Style Keyboard
-----------------------------------------------------------
Belgian Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Czech Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Danish Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Dutch Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
English Canadian Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Finnish Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Flemish Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
French Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
French Canadian Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Swiss French Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
German Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Swiss German Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Hungarian Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Italian Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Lithuanian Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Norwegian Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Polish Left Compose+U Right Alt+u
Portuguese None Right Alt+E
Serb/Croat/Slovene Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Slovak Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Spanish Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Swedish Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
Turkish Left Compose+E Right Alt+E
United Kingdom Left Compose+4 Right Alt+4
-----------------------------------------------------------
For more information about keyboards, keymaps, and character-entry methods, see keyboard(5).
Font Support for the Euro Character
The operating system does not provide native Unicode fonts that include glyphs for the euro character. However, the character is supported
by a set of Latin-9 fonts. The X font library has been extended to combine a number of fonts together to provide logical Unicode fonts for
applications to use. The names of these logical fonts end with ISO10646-1. You can use the xlsfonts utility to find out if these fonts are
installed on your system.
Printer Support for the Euro Character
Printing of file data in UTF-8 or Latin-9 format is supported by a generic PostScript print filter. See wwpsof(8) for information on how to
configure this print filter.
SEE ALSO
Commands: xlsfonts(1X), wwpsof(8)
Others: code_page(5), i18n_intro(5), i18n_printing(5), iconv_intro(5), iso8859-15(5), keyboard(5), l10n_intro(5), Unicode(5)
Writing Software for the International Market
euro(5)