[Alpine-info] UTF8 test

[Lucio Chiappetti]

On Thu, 30 Apr 2009, Joshua Daniel Franklin wrote:


> Original RXVT does not support unicode. You might try urxvt or 

> rxvt-unicode, or a terminal mentioned here 

> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#xterm


BTW urxvt and rxvt-unicode are the same thing, the former is the runtime 
name, the second the project name on its website.

In principle xterm with an iso10646-1 font should have good unicode 
support. In fact it does, I can see the test in
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt even better 
than in firefox (where some alignments fail).

There were however some gotchas.

  - xterm started from my window manager (fvwm) without special
    resources comes out nicely with unicode support. Only it does not
    display amharic in the test file. If one selects the second font
    in control-MB3 (labelled "Unicode best" if one has no own .Xdefaults
    which alter it) *everything* comes out perfect.
    It seems unnecessary to setenv LC_CTYPE

  - xterm started from the command line (or as an alias, and even
    passing a resource file with specific fonts indicated) does NOT
    work UNLESS one specifies "xterm -u8".

    It looks like (query posted on fvwm mailing list) that -u8 is
    somehow implicitly enabled by fvwm,

  - choice of fonts may be critical. e.g.
    Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1 does not
    show all glyphs while the -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal of the same
    font does,

  - my favourite choice is
    -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso10646-1
    which is the largish one I was used to with rxvt (if it is not
    the same, is very similar)

  - urxvt is very easy to build ... but does not work exactly as rxvt
    (for instance there is no cycling between font sizes with KP_ADD)

    however for it to work, it is critical to do a setenv LC_CTYPE

    and apparently it is rather critical WHERE one does it.

    I generally start alpine in a separate window (rxvt now urxvt)
    passing as -e a script name which runs alpine.

    Now on my personal account I had to add setenv LC_CTYPE en_US.UTF-8
    INSIDE the script.

    On the no-spam newsreading account I "su" to for anonymous newsreading
    setenv LC_CTYPE in the script does NOT work. The script itself is
    started by a source file, and the source file is sourced in .cshrc.
    I had to move the setenv into the source file itself (although it
    worked sourcing it manually).

Anyhow all is well what ends well ...

-- 
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
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