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. > Are these line drawing glyphs in Unicode, anywhere? Yes. Mutt displays perfectly fine on my UTF-8 console, for what it's worth. > 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 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. > > > Now I find that the line graphics in the message index, rather > > > than looking like lines, look something like this: > > > > M-b~T~\M-b~T~@> It seems that either your *console* is not set up for UTF-8, or the font which is loaded does not contain the glyphs. Given that what you're getting is all 8-bit ASCII, I expect it's more likely the former than the latter. On my system, where the console is properly set up as a UTF-8 console, it displays diamond characters when the font has no glyph for the character it is trying to display. 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. > > > . A bit of internet searching reveals the workaround of setting LANG > > > thusly: > > > > LANG=C mutt > > > > , but this is a mere workaround since it disables UTF-8 where it's > > > really wanted. It's no workaround at all; you are indeed turning off UTF-8 and using plain ASCII. > > > Is there a proper solution to this dilemma? There definitely is, though figuring out what it is and then implementing it may turn out to be really not worth the effort. Given that it's not already defaulting to UTF-8 on your system, I imagine your system is pretty old, as most major distros have been defaulting to UTF-8 for roughly 5+ years or so. You may need to replace your kernel in order to make the console work properly, install some console fonts and utilities to load them, etc. depending on the current state of your system. If your system is as old as I suspect, then likely by far the easiest way to deal with this is to upgrade your system to a recent distro. You'll get UTF-8 configured properly everywhere by default (as long as you don't tell it not to), and you'll gain a lot of other benefits too. 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. Hope that helps. -- 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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