On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 12:37:43PM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote: | > That may be so, but gnome-terminal /does/ cope with this situation by | > displaying replacing the hyphen with a minus sign when the font doesn't | | Then gnome-terminal is broken and deservers a bug report.
I disagree. gnome-terminal is behaving as intended, i.e., displaying the nearest character to a hyphen present in the font it was instructed to use. Incidentally, below are screenshots of "man rm" on three different terminal emulators. In order of increasing brokenness of display: http://cp.yi.org/cameron/hyphen/gnome-terminal.png http://cp.yi.org/cameron/hyphen/xterm.png http://cp.yi.org/cameron/hyphen/konsole.png | > contain the former. Konsole and xterm do not. xterm is my preferred | | They should not. They implement an UTF-8 terminal correctly, | gnome-terminal does not if I follow your explanation. gnome-terminal, like other GTK2 apps, deals gracefully with fonts with missing characters. Konsole, like other KDE/Qt apps, does not. | Though I could imagine this character replacement as an option, so the | user may enable it he likes it. Implementing it as optional would be possible, I suppose, but I fail to see why anyone would enable an option which gives them an inferior display. | > terminal emulator and it would be nice to see it cope gracefully with | > incomplete fonts---and after all, I would imagine that in the majority | > of fonts there exists some Unicode character which is missing and | > another similar character which could be substituted for it. | | Hyphens are not missing. They are meant to be hyphens and should be | presented as hyphens and not as some other char. They are missing in the font that I am using. Thus they are /not/ displayed as hyphens, they are displayed as little boxes. Presenting them as minus signs is certainly preferable to refusing to display them at all. | > | It was promised that groff will recode hyphen to minus sign in some | > | future version (maybe as an option) to work around broken manpages. | > | > That would be a workaround for this particular case - which is admittedly | > the only that I've noticed. | | That will be the only sane workaround except of fixing the actual | problems in the manpages. No. There is no problem with manpages using hyphens. If a font contains separate hyphens and minus signs, they should be presented as hyphens in UTF-8 locales, too. If a font does /not/ contain a hyphen character, displaying them as the closest approximation that is contained in that font, or perhaps even as a hyphen from another font, is the Right Thing to do. Cheers, Cameron.
