Some accessibility programs for Windows may need this option enabling to be able to control PuTTY's window successfully. For instance, Dragon NaturallySpeaking requires it both to open the system menu via voice, and to close, minimise, maximise and restore the window.
4.9.5 ‘System menu appears on Alt alone’
If this option is enabled, then pressing and releasing ALT will bring up the PuTTY window's menu, like clicking on the top left corner. If it is disabled, then pressing and releasing ALT will have no effect.
4.9.6 ‘Ensure window is always on top’
If this option is enabled, the PuTTY window will stay on top of all other windows.
4.9.7 ‘Full screen on Alt-Enter’
If this option is enabled, then pressing Alt-Enter will cause the PuTTY window to become full-screen. Pressing Alt-Enter again will restore the previous window size.
The full-screen feature is also available from the System menu, even when it is configured not to be available on the Alt-Enter key. See
section 3.1.3.7
.
4.10 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.
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4.10.1 Controlling character set translation
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4.10.2 ‘Treat CJK ambiguous characters as wide’
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4.10.3 ‘Caps Lock acts as Cyrillic switch’
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4.10.4 Controlling display of line-drawing characters
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4.10.5 Controlling copy and paste of line drawing characters
4.10.1 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. Similarly, PuTTY needs to know how to translate your keystrokes into the encoding the server expects. Unfortunately, there is no satisfactory mechanism for PuTTY and the server to communicate this information, so it must usually be manually configured.
There are a lot of character sets to choose from. The ‘Remote character set’ option lets you select one.
By default PuTTY will use the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode, which can represent pretty much any character; data coming from the server is interpreted as UTF-8, and keystrokes are sent UTF-8 encoded. This is what most modern distributions of Linux will expect by default. However, if this is wrong for your server, you can select a different character set using this control.
A few other 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’.
If you need support for a numeric code page which is not listed in the drop-down list, such as code page 866, then you can try entering its name manually (CP866 for example) in the list box. If the underlying version of Windows has the appropriate translation table installed, PuTTY will use it.
4.10.2 ‘Treat CJK ambiguous characters as wide’