[linux] Ncurses! (I am so clueless)

[Peter Woodman]

On Aug 30, 2005, at 7:51 PM, Evan Martin wrote:

> On 8/30/05, Marie Tessier <marie at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>> Also, I do not seem to have the fun bits of symbols that belong in  
>> ASCII
>> characters 128 through 255 (for that matter, some of the fun
>> low-numbered stuff like smiley faces is missing too).  When I code  
>> up an
>> ASCII chart (go through the integers, interpret them as  
>> characters), I
>> just get blanks after 127.  I was hoping for the (standard?)  
>> complement
>> of vertical and horizontal bars, dashes, and corners.  I think this
>> might be a font issue?  If so, how do I get better fonts and install
>> them so they do not scramble my otherwise stable system?  And if  
>> it is
>> not fonts, what is it?
>>
>
> It depends on two things:
>  - the character encodings of ncurses and your terminal
>  - your fonts
>
> One thing to try is doing your ASCII chart printing thing and then
> cut'n'paste from your terminal into a GUI editor (like gedit or kwrite
> or whatever that's called).  If you get some characters (probably
> European characters with umlauts and accents), then konsole is getting
> the right data sent to it but it's failing to display it (font issue).
>
> If you get nothing, then you should check the output of "locale", as
> well as the ncurses man page, and the konsole preferences to verify
> they all agree on the encoding.
>
> In general, those characters from 128-255 in DOS were a DOS-specific
> thing, and Linuxes these days follow international standards.  So it's
> likely that you won't get the line-drawing characters.  However, you
> should be getting something...

honestly, most of this boils down to "ncurses is weird".