How to change from UTF-8 to ISO-8859?

[ioctlvoid]

How can I change my locale to use ISO-8859-1 instead of the default UTF-8?

OS: Linux Mint 14 (XFCE), 64-bit

[catweazel]

How can I change my locale to use ISO-8859-1 instead of the default UTF-8?

OS: Linux Mint 14 (XFCE), 64-bit

System Tools > System Settings > Language Support

[ioctlvoid]

How can I change my locale to use ISO-8859-1 instead of the default UTF-8?

OS: Linux Mint 14 (XFCE), 64-bit

System Tools > System Settings > Language Support

This can't possibly be right.

In "Language Support" I'm able to select "langauge for menus and windows", "Install / Remove Languages ...", "Keyboard input method system" and change regional formats. However, there is no way for me to change the character encoding.

How can I change the character encoding?

[xenopeek]

I don't recommend doing this, as UTF-8 supports all characters from ISO-8859-1, but not the other way around. You may end up with garbage characters: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... -terminal/. I'll outline the steps below, but I urge you to also share why you want to do this as there may be a better way without dropping UTF-8, which is recommend to be used on Linux these days.

Edit your /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local file as root:

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gksudo gedit /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local

Add a line for each language you want with ISO-8859-1, for example for en_US you would add:

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en_US.ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1

Enable the new encodings:

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sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Finally, edit your /etc/default/locale file as root and set your preferences there:

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gksudo gedit /etc/default/locale

For the above example, I would set:

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LANG="en_US.ISO-8859-1"

If you have any LC_ variable defined in your /etc/default/locale, you would update these also. Reboot to activate. To undo the changes you did, just revert your /etc/default/locale to its previous setting (probably LANG="en_US.UTF-8").

Again, I urge you to reconsider this course of action. If you have some text files in ISO-8859-1 format for example, you can use the Linux recode command to convert between character sets (converting the files to UTF-8 format).

[ioctlvoid]

I don't recommend doing this, as UTF-8 supports all characters from ISO-8859-1, but not the other way around. You may end up with garbage characters: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... -terminal/. I'll outline the steps below, but I urge you to also share why you want to do this as there may be a better way without dropping UTF-8, which is recommend to be used on Linux these days.

Edit your /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local file as root:

Code: Select all

gksudo gedit /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local

Add a line for each language you want with ISO-8859-1, for example for en_US you would add:

Code: Select all

en_US.ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1

Enable the new encodings:

Code: Select all

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Finally, edit your /etc/default/locale file as root and set your preferences there:

Code: Select all

gksudo gedit /etc/default/locale

For the above example, I would set:

Code: Select all

LANG="en_US.ISO-8859-1"

If you have any LC_ variable defined in your /etc/default/locale, you would update these also. Reboot to activate. To undo the changes you did, just revert your /etc/default/locale to its previous setting (probably LANG="en_US.UTF-8").

Again, I urge you to reconsider this course of action. If you have some text files in ISO-8859-1 format for example, you can use the Linux recode command to convert between character sets (converting the files to UTF-8 format).

Thanks, this actually worked.

I'll tell you why I want ISO-8859. From my past experience there will sooner or later occur some sort of problem related to UTF-8 that will have to be sorted out by switching to ISO-8859. This was a bigger problem before than it is now, but it is still an issue.

E.g. when I SSH to a particular machine running ISO-8859 I get very strange behavior in pine when I'm using that program. I tried to switch to UTF-8 on that remote system, but it didn't help. Now with ISO-8859, everything works perfectly fine.

[xenopeek]

In that case, I'd revert /etc/default/locale to its previous configuration (probably LANG="en_US.UTF-8"). When you need to use a program for with UTF-8 is a problem, change the command to start the program to:

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LANG="en_US.ISO-8859-1" command

For example, with ssh, instead of doing:

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ssh username@remotehost.tld

you would do:

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LANG="en_US.ISO-8859-1" ssh username@remotehost.tld

That should work. You have already enable support for en_US.ISO-8859-1, so you can use it for a single program or command as needed by prefixing it like this. This works for graphical applications as well.