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Bug#253211: Fix and some thoughts [Was: Bug#253211: Problems with the screen display in second stage]



Hi,

I've finally figured out the cause for this problem.  To put it shortly 
the problem is that, unlike the lat{0,2}-sun16 fonts, there is indeed no 
box-drawing chars in iso0{1,2}.f16 fonts used in the related lines of 
termwrap.  We could consider the resulting appearance as a feature (ie.  
dialogs without borders), but of course this might be far from the 
common taste also :-)

As a note to Joey, your /etc/console-tools/config is irrevelant for this 
case, though 'lat0-sun16' is defined there.  Because termwrap specifies 
its own settings for the second-stage installation (console-tools 
settings are used in the first termwrap-less normal login).  This  also 
explains why some languages do not suffer from the problem, as Christian 
reported for French.  In the current setup, all the iso-15 languages 
(French, German, Finnish etc.) consistently use lat0-sun16 font, both in 
console-tools/config (which is installed by prebaseconfig) and termwrap.  
Default entry in languagechooser (C or whatever) is just a special case 
handled by the following line in termwrap:

	try_load_charset "C" iso01 iso01.f16

The fix is simple, just do a 's/iso01.f16/lat0-sun16/' in above line of 
termwrap (and perhaps repeat this substitute on all iso01.f16 fonts).  I 
think this might be the urgent fix for an upcoming 'tc1'.  But for 
future releases, I would like to learn the comments on some alternatives 
(I'll consider only the iso encodings):

(1) For all languages, use the proper fonts with the box drawing chars 
in everywhere (both in termwrap and console-tools/config), providing 
that the selected font can properly display national chars.  For 
example, we couldn't use lat0-sun16 for Turkish, since some Turkish 
spesific glyphes simply would not exist.

(2) For the debconf newt, treat this "dialog boxes without frames" 
appearance as a feature, and use the iso* fonts in everywhere.  This 
somewhat ensures a common appearance for all languages and do not have 
any national screen problem.

(3) As I prefer for Turkish, use Terminus font (ter-*) for all iso
languages.  From the description of 'console-terminus' package:

  The following charsets are supported: western
     European Latin, central European Latin, Turkish Latin, Romanian
     Latin, Slavic Cyrillic and Asian Cyrillic (Bashkyr, Kazakh, 
     Mongolian and others).

Terminus (maintained by Anton Zinoviev) is really a visually appealing 
font, and it also has box drawing characters.  There is another package 
'xfonts-terminus' which can be used in X terminals, hence a consistent 
appearance can be ensured.  Just install the package and give a try:

	consolechars -m iso15 -f ter-116f

Regards,

P.S. I have some other concerns for the 'termwrap', but will explain 
them later (clue: #250789).

-- 
roktas

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