Using the Euro Sign in X11.

See the euro sign in HTML and in some other contexts, by Jukka Korpela, for more general issues about the euro sign.

The following just lists some hints in a compressed form. See using 8 bit characters in X11 for more details about mapping keys.

There are at least two ways:

• The easy, but incomplete way:

  Use an appropriate font to display "iso8859-15" (instead of e.g. iso8859-1 for western europe). At the codepoint 169 (hex: 00a9), it contains the euro symbol .

  You can request this codepoint by using the KeySym name "currency". In an iso8859-1 font, this looks like a small circle with four strokes (sort of a small sun) .

  So this way is actually not really hackish, as the currency symbol is not in general use, anyway. Consider it as sort of a placeholder. But not all programs support displaying ISO8859-15.

  How to start:

  	$ xlsfonts -fn '*-iso8859-15'  # find iso8859-15 fonts on your system
  	  [...]
  	$ xfd   -fn  6x13-iso8859-15   # look at a font (arbitrary example)
  	$ xterm -fn  6x13-iso8859-15 

  You can make use of the currency KeySym (to access the codepoint) in several ways:

  • It's unlikely that you want to map currency 'literally' on a cap, but it's certainly possible...

  • Usually you will be using the AltGr mechanism, aka "Mode_switch":

    	$ xev  # find the keycode for your preferred cap, likely 'e'
    	$ xmodmap -e 'keycode <your keycode> = e E currency'   

    Now you can use "AltGr e" -- if your AltGr is set up correctly.

  • Using the compose mechanism, aka "Multi_key":
    

    If compose is working for you, then just type <compose> <x> <o> (or another working compose sequence).
    (You also might have compose being configured as <Shift-AltGr> or <Shift-RightControl>).

• The Unicode way:

  Install Unicode fonts and use an application that knows Unicode. A good example is the XFree86 XTerm (and appropriate text oriented applications to run in) in conection with Markus Kuhn's Unicode Fonts

  Then you can actually map the KeySym "EuroSign" on you keyboard. Without Unicode you can't use this, as it addresses a high codepoint (hex: 0x20ac), which is not avilable in the small standard fonts.

  Recent XFree86 versions provide unicode support and AFAIK, it's even the default in some Linux distributions. I have no experience with this.

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