Re: Bug#666542: incorrect rendering of lat15 characters
[I am sending CC to debian-bsd@lists.debian.org.]
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 06:13:34PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
>
> When I install console-setup on GNU/kFreeBSD, extended lat15 characters are
> replaced by weird fonts. For example, attached screenshot displays the output
> of "ls --version" command with Catalan locale. It should read:
>
> [...]
> GPLv3+: llicència GNU GPL ver. 3 o posterior <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
> Aquest és programari lliure: podeu modificar??lo i redistribuir??lo si voleu.
> No hi ha CAP GARANTIA, en la mesura que ho permeta la llei.
>
> (don't worry about the copyright sign, this is a problem with original fonts too)
>
> My /etc/default/console-setup has CHARMAP=UTF-8 and CODESET=Lat15. Before
> installing console-setup, UTF-8 characters could be sent to terminals, and
> the subset of Unicode that can be rendered using CP437 worked fine.
Unfortunately kFreeBSD kernels seem to be unfriendly to localizations.
I suppose this is due to the UTF-8 patch. I suppose it is possible to
fix this without changes in the kernel with some undocumented command,
but unfortunately last time I checked I was unable to find any useful
documentation.
So in order to fix this important bug I need help. I don't know how one
can use on kFreeBSD fonts that are not encoded in CP437. On normal
FreeBSD one can use the following commands:
vidcontrol -f FONT_FILE
vidcontrol -l FONT_ENCODING_FILE
I am almost certain that in order to do this with current kernels one
has to disable somehow the UTF mode on the console and work in 8-bit
encoding.
In case what I am asking is impossible (or nobody knows how to do it)
there are two alternatives.
1. I can disable font loading in console-setup on kFreeBSD. This is bad
because CP437 covers only few languages.
2. kFreeBSD can use UTF-8 kernel in the installer (because the installer
relies on UTF-8) and normal kernel in the installed Debian with 8-bit
encoding. The installer supports all required 8-bit encodings so I don't
think changes will be required in it. Infact in the past this was the
standard behaviour of the installer on Linux, namely to use UTF-8 during
the installation and 8-bit encoding after the installation.
I think on normal FreeBSD console-setup works "out of the box". So if
some developer has FreeBSD (not Debian) and wants to see how
console-setup works there (s)he can test console-setup using its source
package:
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/c/console-setup/console-setup_1.75.tar.gz
Anton Zinoviev
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