Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm



On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 11:03:23AM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote:

Thomas,

The output of locale (invoked without arguments) is as follows,
between the two lines.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
kilgota@khayyam:/etc/X11/app-defaults$ locale |less
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Those settings should work (the important ones are LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE, LANG).
 
There is a line called "line-drawing characters" which is *not*
turned on. It is unclear to me what this does (see the xterm man
page for an explanation, which is not totally clear). What it might
be doing is turning on the line-drawing characters from X itself, to
replace the ones which are provided by the font, or alternatively
what it might be doing is enabling the line-drawing characters which
are already provided by the font. As I said, the explanation in the
man page is not very clear and these two meanings are obviously
opposite to each other. In any event, to toggle this setting on and
off all by itself, when other settings are not changed, seems to
have no effect.

There are also lines in that menu for UTF-8 Encoding, UTF-8 Fonts,
and UTF-8 Titles. These are also apparently not turned on (no check
marks in front).

Setting UTF-Encoding *and* UTF-8 Fonts *and* Line-Drawing Characters
all to be on seems to solve the problem. But by default all three of
them are turned off.

Why are all three of these settings turned off by default? I have no

Line-Drawing is normally turned off because a well-designed font will
look better than xterm's built-in equivalent (since it may use thick
lines for large characters).

UTF-8 Fonts would be turned on if you used the "uxterm" shell script
to setup xterm, which gives better coverage of Unicode.

UTF-8 Encoding isn't on either because there's some problem with the locale
_tables_ or due to a resource setting.  If you have "appres" installed,
you may see the problem in the output of "appres XTerm".

idea. In particular, this is even more amazing because it seems to
be in conflict with the locale settings displayed above. So, in
order to get back to the bottom of this problem it seems to me that
what needs to be done is to set up a way to turn all three of these
settings on. However, I do not know what I am supposed to do in
order to carry that out. Change some configuration file, I suppose,
or else do a local override. But I suspect that the settings are
already set correctly in some file somewhere and that somehow the
settings in that file are being ignored.

I'd try using the "uxterm" script (it's supposed to do most of the
fixes you need).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey invisible-island net>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net

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