UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

First of all hello, this is my first post here.

I have a problem with displaying the euro sign and two other characters from the ISO8859-7 greek set (the drachma sign and the ipogegrameni) in the UNIX platform. Either when I type them normally or if i try to read a text file with some of these symbols, they either appear as ? or as square control chars.

Any idea if there is a patch or some other solution to this problem?

Whe you say
which application do you specifically mean? An editor? A terminal?

Are you certain that the characters you cannot see are part of ISO8859-7? The ISO8859 character sets surely predate the Euro, for example (and I cannot see these characters in the codepage at, e.g. ISO 8859-7:1987 Latin/Greek Alphabet :: ascii, ascii table, codepage, code page, extended)

Perhaps the document you are reading is written in a Unicode charset? You might need to changes the charset of your Unix application. Many X11 applications (e.g. xterm) can typically take a -fn flag to specify the Unix font to be used. Unix font names are bizarrely long but you can use xfonsel to see what you have. Also xfd is useful for displaying a given font.

I've used putty and xterm, already tried different fonts but to no avail. The problem arises with a program that translates utf-8 files to iso 8859-7 format. The thing is, that either using the iconv app or the program itself, these 3 chars are not properly tanslated.

There seems to be a newer version of the iso 8859-7 table (ISO/IEC 8859-7 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) which includes these 3 chars. But it seems this particular system has the older one. So, i was wondering if there was a patch to fix this.