On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 04:08:24PM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > 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.
If your environment is indeed properly set up as UTF-8, that should not ever happen. The console driver should recognize that its font has no glyph for the UTF-8 character which it is trying to print, and print a diamond instead. The behavior you are seeing is that the console is treating this as three separate ASCII characters. > 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. Those two behaviors are consistent with this: > 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. I guess it depends how you're installing Mutt. If you have the ncursesw *devel* bits installed, IIRC mutt will notice them when you configure it (i.e. manual compile). Gentoo's software management is pretty unique, and I have no experience with it, but if you're using emerge then I would expect the same thing *should* be true. So the key is to make sure that you have the development portion of the ncursesw library installed. There are probably gentoo savvy people here, but you may get a faster response by asking on their list instead. > > 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. Can't help here either, for the same reason. > Does mutt use the environment variables like LANG and LC_.... to > determine how to output stuff? Yes, absolutely. [Generally you want to set LANG properly and let the LC_* vars inherit from it.] In the past though, you did have to do things to tell the kernel that you wanted to use a UTF-8 console. That seems to have changed, as I don't need to do this on either my Fedora or Ubuntu installs... But I haven't built a custom kernel since the 2.4 days; so I can't say whether there's some required configuration option in the kernel config stuff that you may need to enable to make it work properly. But there's a fairly easy test for this: If you have a file lying around which contains umlauts or other diacritic characters and which you're sure is encoded using UTF-8, just cat it on the console. If it displays properly, or if you see diamonds in positions where non-8-bit UTF-8 characters should be, then your console is fine. Probably fixing mutt's build will make it work properly, I would guess. > A very great deal, thanks! No problem. I went through all this long ago when the software was still poor and the docs were poorer, so I feel your pain. You have it relatively easy now. ;-) -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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