Question

How should I set preferences to use german letter in sitenames and filenames?

Answer

To support accented national characters such as 'ü' in WikiWords, you need to edit TWiki.cfg's Internationalisation section as directed in the comments in that file - mainly to set TWiki to use locales. The default locale for TWiki uses ISO-8859-1 as the character encoding, which is commonly used for German. Here's an extract from my TWiki.cfg (see testenv output as well) - the only change is to $useLocale.

 
# Set $useLocale to 1 to enable internationalisation support for
# 8-bit character sets
$useLocale = 1;
$siteLocale = "en_US.ISO-8859-1";

You may want a locale such as de_AT.ISO-8859-1 (TWiki doesn't do much with the language code but it does change pluralisation behaviour).

The above assumes Perl 5.6.1 on Unix/Linux, with working locales - if not, there are are workarounds that enable key I18N features to work OK anyway. InternationalisationEnhancements has some background and important browser setup.

You can't really use international characters in site names since there is no accepted standard for I18N of DNS hostnames and domain names (although people are working this). You can use international characters in the contents of TWiki pages, as on this one, even without $useLocale set to 1.

-- RichardDonkin - 08 Dec 2003