I'm using espeak-ng and reading this message with the symbols in it only generated silence when trying to read the symbols. I'm using utf-8 here and don't have any kind of font chosen or set so far as I know. On my end all of this is happening in the console environment.
-- Jude <jdashiel at panix dot com> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and amo. Please use in that order." Ed Howdershelt 1940. On Mon, 27 Mar 2023, debian-u...@howorth.org.uk wrote: > Greg Wooledge <g...@wooledge.org> wrote: > > On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 12:04:53PM -0400, Thomas George wrote: > > > I am amazed that the playing card symbols spade, heart, diamond and > > > club don't appear any of the collections in my Debian Buster > > > programs. I can insert them in the text I type by entering > > > CTRL-SHIFT-Uunicode but if this text in a Thunderbird email to a > > > friend he receives only the unicode. > > > > If you paste, or type, one of these Unicode characters into the body > > of your email, and if your Mail User Agent correctly encodes it and > > sets the right MIME headers, then it should work as intended. > > > > ? ? ? ? > > > > I'm using mutt, and it looks like mutt is going to send this message > > encoded as "text/plain, 8bit, utf-8". > > > > The reading MUA will have to be able to display these characters > > (something about fonts, which are not my strong point). > > I think that is exactly the OP's point. It is somewhat likely that the > recipient will be using a font that does not include the playing card > glyphs, and the OP wonders why they aren't more universal in fonts. > > > Just to be clear, are you using some kind of Desktop Environment > > specific means of entering these Unicode characters? I don't know > > what CTRL-SHIFT-Uunicode means. If I try it here, it just gets > > interpreted as Ctrl-U which kills the line I'm typing in vim. > > No, he's using a standard keyboard mechanism which works well inside > gvim here for example, or in a normal terminal (lxterminal to be > precise). You hold down CTRL and SHIFT and then press U. You should see > an underlined lower case letter U. Now type the four digit code, e.g. > 2660. You will see the digits be echoed, also underlined and perhaps > with a coloured background. Now press ENTER and the whole lot is > magically replaced with a 'black spade suit' glyph. > > > The way I entered these characters was, first, to look up their > > Unicode values on the web (2660, 2663, 2665 and 2666). Then in a > > terminal running bash, I used printf '\u2660\n' and so on. I used > > the mouse to copy and paste the characters from that terminal into > > this one, where I'm writing this email (in vim, in mutt, in screen, > > in rxvt-unicode). > > ? it also appears to work directly in my MUA (claws). > > > I could also have copy/pasted the characters from the web page where I > > found their Unicode code point numbers. > > > > > I don't understand why these symbols are not as ubiquitous as all > > > the smiley faces. > > > > Well, I guess card games are not as popular among the younger crowd. > > I suspect you may be right, which I find disappointing as an > explanation for the phenomenon. > >
