How can I create foreign letters in DOS?

[Noobie]

How would I create umlauts or accents in DOS?

[ygfperson]

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

[Carlos]

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:

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!

[SyntaxBubble]

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 =)!!

[Eibro]

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.

[Carlos]

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.