Installation guide

4-3
Bull S.A. May 25th, 1999
iconv –f ISO8859–15 –t IBM–858 fic1 > fic2
1.9 Where is the Euro Character on the keyboard?
The CEN standard defines the key where the Euro character is engraved on:
Key Country
altGr–E Denmark, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden,
Italy, Spain, Belgium, NetherLands, France,
Switzerland, Germany
altGr–4 United Kingdom, Ireland
altGr–5 United States
altGr–U Poland
1.10 What Difficulties Are Encountered With the Euro Character?
The Euro character must be seized, displayed, printed, and transmitted. However:
• It is not engraved on all keyboards.
• It is not defined in the ISO8859–1, and IBM–1252 codifications that are today applied on
the customer systems.
• It may be used for applications.
• It is not defined for all locale program definitions.
2. What are the Consequences for the User?
• If the hardware is partially upgraded to support the Euro character, it may not be able to
seize, to display, to print, or to transmit the Euro character.
• If the hardware supports different Euro codifications, the administrator must make sure
that the configuration correctly manages this case.
• In the case of old, non-upgradable systems, a work around is to use the character ”E” for
the Euro symbol (this solution is recommended by the French Ministry of Finances). But
”E” can be confounded with the character ”F”, for example when it is printed on old
printers.
• On non-upgradable terminals the hex code a4 sent to the AIX system is still displayed as
the ancient code of the ISO table ( ¤ ).
• All customer applications that treat the Euro character need to be modified.
• Data transmitted via network (TCP,...) should clearly indicate the norm of codification of
the Euro character since several codifications can be used (except for the UTF–8
codification).
3. Recommendations
• Choose a unique code for the representation of the Euro character in AIX. The
recommended code is the one of ISO8859–15: hex a4.
• Create filters for peripheral devices (setmaps, maps,) to convert this code automatically
from and to.
Example: you use RPC DCE between an AIX system and a GCOS7 system. The
codification of the Euro character is hex a4 on AIX and EBCDIC hex 9F on GCOS7.
The software under GCOS7 makes the conversions:
9F –> a4 to send to AIX
a4 –> 9F to receive from AIX.