[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: how to see accented characters in gnome-terminal?



On Sun, Nov 10, 2002 at 03:19:15PM -0500, Steve M. Robbins wrote:
> > Bundling font and encoding together is one of the busted crackmonkey
> > features of classic X fonts fixed with fontconfig/Xft2. ;-)
> 
> I was trying hard to stay neutral -- I am not really interested
> in a flame war about who is at fault  ;-)

Don't worry, some of the same people designed classic X fonts and
fontconfig/Xft2, so the same people are to blame either way. ;-)
Limits the flames if nothing else.

> However it is resolved, it seems to me that these things should "just
> work" out of the box. 

I agree, of course. The problem is that for that to happen, all 
text must be either:

 - in Unicode
 - in some way encoding-tagged, if only implicitly by the current
   locale (though relying on the locale is very very fragile)

For plain text files, often they don't qualify. A historical screwup
we'll get fixed someday...

(Things that "just work" in Latin-1, when the above two conditions
don't exist, are often broken in Asian or Unicode locales for
example. "Just work" is good, Europe/USA-only hacks are not.)

Havoc



Reply to: