On Wed, 16 May 2012, richard emberson wrote:
I am using a linux system with console Vim 7.3 in an xterm.
If I start the xterm with font 10x20, then if I enter
Cntl-V u 250C
I see BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT DOWN AND RIGHT character and entering 'ga'
shows that its there.
If I enter
Cntl-V u 2554
the BOX DRAWINGS DOUBLE DOWN AND RIGHT
does not show up, but entering 'ga' shows that its there.
On the other hand, if I start the xterm with font
'-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-20-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*' then both
characters are displayed and using 'ga' shows them both just like
using the 10x20 font.
Clearly, the non-unicode font 10x20 does not support the extended BOX
DRAWINGS DOUBLE character and it does not get rendered.
Is there a way in Vim to tell if a character will actually
be rendered for the end viewer?
No, most(?)¹ terminal emulators don't have such a mechanism.
So, a script can know not to use that character.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Why would a script care? If a user
opens a file in terminal Vim and it contains characters that can't be
displayed, the user can just quit and open it in another editor that can
display the characters (another terminal with a different font, or some
GUI program). The user can also, as you reported, edit the file anyway
(Vim won't corrupt the data -- it just won't be displayed properly).
Otherwise, if it's not a file, why does Vim come into play?
Or, must the end user of the script always have to figure out that
they must set some configuration options to disable the use of such
characters?
Maybe a flag such as '--ascii' or '--no-unicode' to prevent the use of
"fancy" box drawing would be sufficient? `pstree`, for example, has
three modes:
-A|--ascii : ASCII characters
-G|--vt100 : VT-100 line drawing
-U|--unicode : Unicode box drawing characters
--
Best,
Ben
¹: I'm 90% sure you could finagle this through rxvt-unicode's Perl
extensions, but there's definitely no portable way to do it.
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