A Method to Write Latvian in LINUX Mandriva and Mageia
Note: This should work also for other languages, if you use the appropriate keytables and encodings.Author: Waldis Ilgonis Jirgens
Select in the Mandriva Control Center keyboard-layout Latvian and restart X.
Then depress the right "Alt" key, whenever you want to write Latvian special characters instead of the regular ones. Well that works, but you must be careful, which application you use! If you have written some Latvian text using gedit, and have stored it on disk, have a look at it with khexedit: Every single special character has been converted into a 2-byte combination! Other editors may either not work at all (nedit) or give you question-marks instead of the special characters. It also depends on the windowmanager you use!
You can use LibreOffice, if you specify a file type of "text encoded" with encoding ISO-8859-13 and language "Latvian" when opening a file. When saving it later you again have to specify this encoding. Printing is fine.
The same thing can be done with AbiWord, the only difference being that AbiWord. It has the additional advantage of being a bit faster than LibreOffice.
With Seamonkey composer you cann easily create genuine Latvian www pages. They also print correctly. Email is no problem either.
Beware: It is necessary to use the following line in the <head> section of a page:
<meta charset="iso-8859-13"> (using html 5).
It shows the browsers that this is a Latvian webpage!
When using KDE it is necessary to set in Control Centre the primary keyboard to "Latvian" - otherwise no Latvian special characters can be written.
I myself use Firefox and Seamonkey for browsing Latvian www pages, and Seamonkey for E-mail. As an editor I use AbiWord - all of these programs under any windowmanager.
No special fonts are required
Other Usable Browsers:
Opera
Dillo - Not 100% but page content is OK!
Links-graphic - same as above.
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