[This text is mostly based on the de.comp.os.linux FAQ that is regularly
posted to some German speaking newsgroup.]

Since the 1996-11-15 release of TIN it uses a function that checks if the
characters contained in an article may be displayed properly on your
system. To do this, TIN take advantage of a feature named "locales".
Locales are configuration files with information about national or regional
characteristics, among them language, format of numbers (e.g. if a dot or a
comma is used as a decimal point), format of date and time, and displayable
characters. If the locales are incomplete or not configured correctly, all
characters outside of 7 bit ASCII (including all umlauts) are considered
non-displayable and TIN outputs a question mark instead.

Configuration of locales is done via environment variables. To have umlauts
being displayed you have to set "export LC_CTYPE=de_DE" (if you are using
bash) or "setenv LC_CTYPE de_DE" (if you are using (t)csh, respectively).
Note: You should first try your own language and country codes; e.g. if you
are in the US, the de_DE should be en_US. If that does not work, i.e. you
still have question marks instead of umlauts, try en_US.ISO-8859-1 (or any
other appropriate character set appended). As a last option, you may check
the de_DE example.

If this still is not successful then your locale files are likely
incomplete or even not installed. If you cannot or do not want to install a
recent set of locales (which is a good idea anyway, since more and more
software takes advantage of them) you may fall back to a "brute force"
method and recompile TIN with --disable-locale configured (or ask your
local administration to do so if you use a pre-configured environment). In
this case locales are ignored completely and every character is considered
displayable. Note: This can screw up your terminal.

Dirk Nimmich <dirk@roxel.ms.sub.org>
1999-01-01