xterm start scripts

These little scripts were written to provide a quick and simple way to start xterm with 8-bit fonts for other languages, such as Greek, Russian, Hebrew, or Turkish.

Downloads:

turkxterm (Turkish xterm, using ISO-8859-9)
greekxterm (Greek xterm, using ISO-8859-7)
hebxterm (Hebrew xterm, using ISO-8859-8)
ruxterm (Russian xterm, using KOI8-R)
jpxterm (Japanese xterm, using UTF-8 Unicode)
latin1xterm (Western xterm, using ISO-8859-1)
utf8xterm (Multilingual Unicode xterm, using UTF-8 / ISO-10646-1)

Note that ruxterm could theoretically also use ISO-8859-5, but KOI8 seems the more popular choice.

Why have 8-bit xterms at all? Why not use Unicode?

It's always nice to be able to choose. There are a few good reasons why Unicode xterms are not always the best choice. For instance, some of my HP Entria X terminal stations take quite a long while to download those Unicode fonts into their precious little memory, but 8-bit fonts are quick and snappy and totally sufficient for most purposes, esp. since one can open a differently languaged xterm on demand, using one of the above scripts.

To view the full character set in one of your 8-bit xterms, simply type:

cat table.txt

where table.txt is a simple table of all visible 8-bit characters, which you can download here. This file shows the encoding it's being viewed under (note that it doesn't work for Unicode encodings, since those are not 8-bit!).

If you would like to see and compare all the above 8-bit character sets in one single file, you can download charsets.utf8.txt (in UTF-8 format).