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This document is primarily for people who will be using Lynx
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on a remote UNIX or VMS system via an MS-DOS based terminal program.
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Lynx comes with built-in translation tables to map the 8-bit character codes or
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character entities coming in from an HTML document to their equivalent codes,
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where possible, for various character sets.
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IMPORTANT: you should choose display character set in Lynx Options Menu
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according to your font installed locally. Probably it would be cpXXX. Please
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contact lynx-dev mailing list if you want any new codepage not listed there.
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Note that all points of the connection between the display at your end and Lynx
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at the remote end must be 8-bit clean. If the high bit is being stripped at
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any point in between, the only character set you can use (effectively) in Lynx
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will be "7 bit approximations". More on that later.
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MS-DOS character set weirdness
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==============================
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MS-DOS uses a bass-ackwards character set in which half the normal characters
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have been replaced by pseudo-graphic line and box-drawing characters, and in
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which almost all of the international characters are mapped to nonstandard
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numbers. It also contains Greek letters.
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Further confusing matters, there is more than one MS-DOS character set. The
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character sets are referred to as "codepages," each of which has a unique
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number. IBM PCs and compatibles come with one hardware-based default codepage
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and a keyboard to match. In the US market the hardware codepage is 437. PCs
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destined for other regions of the world often have a different default codepage
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which contains characters for other languages and keyboards. Under MS-DOS, one
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can load different codepages into memory and use one of them instead of the
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If you are using Lynx through an MS-DOS based terminal program or telnet
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client, you should use an appropriate DOS codepage in Lynx and you need not any
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translation within terminal program (this is different from old-style behavior
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and works better because of superior Lynx translation support).
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Check your display by accessing Martin Ramsch's ISO-8859-1 table
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(iso8859-1.html in the Lynx distribution's test subdirectory).
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Ramsch's table describes each entity and shows examples of each. It should be
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immediately obvious that you are either seeing what you are supposed to, or
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you're not. If you see box and line-drawing characters and mismatched letters
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and so on, you are likely displaying 7 bit data, not 8. Ensure that all points
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of your connection are 8-bit clean:
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On any remote UNIX systems you must pass through, do
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'stty cs8 -istrip' or 'stty pass8'. 'stty -a' should list
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On any remote VMS systems, do 'set terminal /eightbit'.
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Make sure your terminal program or telnet client is not filtering
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8-bit data. You may found the choice between "VT-100 strict"
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and "VT-100 relaxed" emulation mode - use relaxed.
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Note: Procomm for DOS has a confusing "Use 7 bit or 8 bit
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ANSI" setting -- this has to do with ANSI sequences. If set to
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8 bit, some 8-bit character sequences, including those passed
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by Lynx as well as those which are for your terminal type
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(vt100, etc.) will be processed by Procomm as ANSI screen
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control codes and will most likely result in a garbled display.
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If going through a dialup terminal server, you may have to set the
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terminal server itself to pass 8 bit data. How to do this
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varies with the make of the server, and in some cases only a
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system admin in charge of the box will have the authorization
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SLIP or PPP connections should already be 8-bit clean.
added
removed
docs/IBMPC-charsets.announce
