Hi, Derek. On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 05:54:38PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 09:41:32PM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > > On Mon, May 09, 2011 at 02:16:23PM -0700, Nick wrote: > > > The font you are using likely doesn't support the line glyphs. > > > I've found Envy Code R to be a good all-purpose font that supports > > > a good number of glyphs.
> > Surely it would have to be included as part of mutt. I think the > > font's author doesn't permit this. > Not at all... The console uses the same font no matter what program > you're running (unless it's a program to set the console font, I > suppose). Mutt has nothing to do with it. Your system provides a > number of fonts which are loadable on the console. How you do that has > changed a number of times though. I suspect the font I'm using is lacking support for the line graphics, and the driver for the screen is helpfully outputting an ASCII representation of the 3 UTF-8 bytes which code up the line graphic code. > > Are these line drawing glyphs in Unicode, anywhere? > Yes. Mutt displays perfectly fine on my UTF-8 console, for what it's > worth. I decoded M-b~T~T to 0xe29494 -> 0x2514. I found a Unicode decoder, and it does indeed say that 0x2514 is the appropriate line glyph. > > I hate unicode, especially UTF-8. Perhaps it would be best for me to > > go back to good old ISO 8859-1. > Not likely. The world is moving (or, by and large, has already moved) > to Unicode; eventually the older encoding schemes will very likely > disappear entirely, and you'll run into all sorts of problems. > There's no reason to hate UTF-8; it is just yet another encoding > system which now very well supported and superior technically to > ISO-8859-1. Don't hate technological advancement because you chose > not to keep up with it... :) I don't agree that new things are always better than old. Unicode has its disadvantages too, but I suspect here isn't really the place to hack out the argument. Feel free to take it to email, though. ;-) > > > > I run mutt 1.5.21 on a Linux virtual terminal (NOT in X). > > > > Yesterday I converted my system software from ISO-8859-1 to > > > > UTF-8. > What does that mean, exactly? What kernel/distro release/version are you > running, and how did you convert? It seems very likely that there are > pieces missing from whatever procedure you followed. I've got linux-2.6.37 running in an up-to-date Gentoo (which has a "rolling release" system). See below for details of my conversion. > One other possibility is that mutt is not built suitably to support > UTF-8. Look at the output of this command: > ldd /path/to/mutt > replacing /path/to/mutt with the actual path to your mutt binary. If > you see libncurses instead of libncursesw, it means mutt was built > without support for wide characters, and will need to be rebuilt. > In that case, most likely you will need to install the correct > ncursesw libraries, including the development bits. This problem has > bitten me a few times in the past. Indeed, my mutt is linking with libncurses.so. I also have a libncursesw.so on my system. How do I persuade mutt to build with ncursesw? There doesn't seem to be a flag in Gentoo's configuration to force this. Maybe I should ask on the Gentoo mailing list. > > > > Is there a proper solution to this dilemma? > There definitely is, ..... You may need to .... install some console > fonts and utilities to load them, etc. depending on the current state > of your system. > If your system is actually recent then telling us what it is and how > you converted it may provide some useful clues as to what's missing. Up to date Gentoo. I converted by editing the boot-up scripts /etc/conf.d/consolefont and /etc/conf.d/keymaps, and creating two new UTF-8 locales (one of which I've set to the default by setting LANG="en_GB.UTF-8" in /etc/env.d/02locale). The font now in use is called default8x16.psfu.gz. I don't know if this contains 0x2514 and friends. Does mutt use the environment variables like LANG and LC_.... to determine how to output stuff? > Hope that helps. A very great deal, thanks! > -- > Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
