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• The Translation panel
• Controlling character set translation
• "Caps Lock acts as Cyrillic switch"
• Controlling display of line drawing characters

Section 3.8: The Translation panel

The Translation configuration panel allows you to control the translation between the character set understood by the server and the character set understood by PuTTY.

3.8.1 Controlling character set translation

During an interactive session, PuTTY receives a stream of 8-bit bytes from the server, and in order to display them on the screen it needs to know what character set to interpret them in.

There are a lot of character sets to choose from. The "Received data assumed to be in which character set" option lets you select one. By default PuTTY will attempt to choose a character set that is right for your locale as reported by Windows; if it gets it wrong, you can select a different one using this control.

A few notable character sets are:

• The ISO-8859 series are all standard character sets that include various accented characters appropriate for different sets of languages.
• The Win125x series are defined by Microsoft, for similar purposes. In particular Win1252 is almost equivalent to ISO-8859-1, but contains a few extra characters such as matched quotes and the Euro symbol.
• If you want the old IBM PC character set with block graphics and line-drawing characters, you can select "CP437".
• PuTTY also supports Unicode mode, in which the data coming from the server is interpreted as being in the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. If you select "UTF-8" as a character set you can use this mode. Not all server-side applications will support it.

3.8.2 "Caps Lock acts as Cyrillic switch"

This feature allows you to switch between a US/UK keyboard layout and a Cyrillic keyboard layout by using the Caps Lock key, if you need to type (for example) Russian and English side by side in the same document.

Currently this feature is not expected to work properly if your native keyboard layout is not US or UK.

3.8.3 Controlling display of line drawing characters

VT100-series terminals allow the server to send control sequences that shift temporarily into a separate character set for drawing lines and boxes. PuTTY has a variety of ways to support this capability. In general you should probably try lots of options until you find one that your particular font supports.

• "Font has XWindows encoding" is for use with fonts that have a special encoding, where the lowest 32 character positions (below the ASCII printable range) contain the line-drawing characters. This is unlikely to be the case with any standard Windows font; it will probably only apply to custom-built fonts or fonts that have been automatically converted from the X Window System.
• "Use font in both ANSI and OEM modes" tries to use the same font in two different character sets, to obtain a wider range of characters. This doesn't always work; some fonts claim to be a different size depending on which character set you try to use.
• "Use font in OEM mode only" is more reliable than that, but can miss out other characters from the main character set.
• "Poor man's line drawing" assumes that the font cannot generate the line and box characters at all, so it will use the +, - and | characters to draw approximations to boxes. You should use this option if none of the other options works.
• "Unicode mode" tries to use the box characters that are present in Unicode. For good Unicode-supporting fonts this is probably the most reliable and functional option.

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