Frédéric Chapoton has written a patch at http://trac.sagemath.org/14733 that will beautify the Sage startup banner using some UTF-8 characters to draw the box. This will display incorrectly in terminals that do not support UTF-8. In that case, Sage still works but the box around the banner is garbled (most likely rendered by placeholder signs for non-ASCII characters).
Of course, various Sage source files are already UTF-8 encoded, usually because of non-ASCII characters in docstrings. These will never render correctly in ancient terminals, nor will editing such source files lead to much happiness. The questions is essentially, do we want to make it clear to the user right at the beginning that his terminal is not up to the task or would we rather only have more subtle errors later? Working terminals: * xterm * urxvt (the rxvt-unicode fork) * gnome-terminal * kterm Not working: * Eterm (unless your distro integrates inofficial patches that are floating around) * aterm * rxvt and various clones that predate rxvt-unicode -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
