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190 SunPCi III 3.2.1 User’s Guide • March 2004
DOS Character Set
When you, or a program you are using, creates a file under DOS, the DOS character
set is used. When you create a file under the Solaris system, the ISO 8859 Latin 1
character set is used. This is relevant only when you use a DOS file in the Solaris
environment, or a Solaris file in the DOS environment. To convert files from one
format to the other, two conversion utilities are provided—dos2unix and
unix2dos. Only characters that are available in both the DOS character set and the
ISO 8859 Latin 1 character set can be converted between formats. Fortunately, most
commonly used characters are available in both character sets.
However, if you have a text file that contains special characters, these characters
might not be convertible. Most word processors and text-processing programs use
special codes in their files to indicate character style or page layout. Most of these
programs, however, have options to store the file as “text only” or to “print to a file,”
which eliminates the special codes and enables you to convert the file using the
dos2unix and unix2dos commands.
Using Code Pages and SunPCi III
Software
DOS provides national language support through the use of language-specific code
pages.
If you want to change code pages at some time, use the KBCP environment variable
as described in “KBCP Environment Variable Values” on page 187.
Code Page Table
A code page is a table that defines the character set you are using. Each character set
contains 256 entries that are specific to a country or language. The characters are
translated from the code page table and used by your keyboard, screen, and printer.
An example is the set of letters, numbers, and symbols (such as accent marks) used
by French Canadians. When the character set is put into a table for use by DOS, it
becomes the Canadian French code page.
There are two types of code pages, hardware and prepared.Ahardware code page is
built into a device. For example, a printer manufactured for use in Portugal has a
Portuguese hardware code page in it. Many devices can use only their own
hardware code page.