How can I create foreign letters in DOS?

How would I create umlauts or accents in DOS?

Umlauts and accents are sure to be there. I wouldn't hold my breath for the Euro, though.

Hold on, there's always a hope :°)
Using some nice (forgotten?) techniques, you can replace EGA/VGA ROM character sets with your own ones.

The easiest way is to use int10h Character generator function 11h and it's subfunctions.

Here is a small assembly snippet from one of my old programs. Assuming you use EGA/VGA textmodes :°), it will do what you need:

Code:

push bx
push cx
push es
push bp // save registers

 mov bp, offset fnt  // set bp to point to your character table
  mov bx,cs   
  mov es,bx   // es points to the code segment
  mov bh,16   // height oof each character
  mov cx,100h // number of characters to redefine (256 - all!)
  xor dx,dx     // ASCII code of the first char to be redefined
  xor bl,bl       // font block to load
  mov ax,1110h // function 11h subfunc. 10h
  int 10h            // video services

pop bp  // restore registers
pop es
pop cx
pop bx

// the user defined font table - 
// there are several freeware tools to create your own VGA fonts
fnt        dw      9 dup (0)
            db       7Eh, 81h,0A5h, 81h, 81h,0BDh
...

Well, I won't copy-paste the full character table here, if you're interested, check e.g. my sysinfo program (pressing TAB will change the fonts, just run it in pure DOS or full-screen window if run in a DOS box[/B]).

Source and binaries also available.
If you need more information about BIOS video functions, check Ralph Browns Interrupt List. Great work!

Have fun!

ASM rules!

Well, if you mean things like this 'é' then you hold ALT, press any 3 or 4 number combination (one after the other) on the right keypad on your keyboard (where it has Enter, +, -, *, /, Num Lock, etc.) and let go of ALT. You can find the different key codes on the web. You can do stuff like '¿' 'Ç', 'é', 'ì', etc. also. Try a Google search for ALT key codes. I hope this helps =)!!

If you're using a Win32 Console, there's always unicode. It involves much more than I care to explain here, so have a look on google about using unicode in your C/C++ applications.

The original question was

How would I create umlauts or accents in DOS?

..and, as this is a site for programmers, I tried to show how one can create characters in DOS.