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Re: ANSI art with xterm



Hello, I have tried resolving this problem until I am blue in the face, I have searched docs on the web, and tried to dig up clues as to why this happens. I have tried using different locales, different fonts etc. cant anyone offer some clues as to why I cant use xterm to run an irc client that draws ansi graphics now? all i know, is that it used to work fine, i had a hard drive fail, and i did an install of etch (daily build) and a dist-upgrade to sid. all I ever had to do to make this work correctly in the past was to install the dosemu fonts and use those with xterm -fn *. can someone please at least offer some clues?

thank you.

On 3/5/07, Jeremy Cyrus <jeremy.cyrus@gmail.com> wrote:
Does anyone have any information for me on this problem please?


On 3/2/07, Jeremy Cyrus < jeremy.cyrus@gmail.com > wrote:
Thus spake Jan Willem Stumpel on Wed, May 10, 2006 at 05:06:20PM +0200 or thereabouts: <jstumpel@planet.nl> [2006-05-10 13:36]:
> cga2000 wrote:
>
>
> Not AFAIK. But xterm basically understands ansi sequences, so it
> should not be difficult to write a filter that would produce the
> picture by means of
>
> cat xxxx.ans |filter
>
> You could use either
>
> -- the special xterm mode which displays box characters
> (something like ESC(O , or something similar, forgot what it
> is).


yes, you're right.. and ESC(B to return to regular display mode..

> or
>
> -- a utf-8 capable xterm
>

that's precisely what I am running..

> The problem is that not only ansi sequences (for colours and
> cursor position) must be interpreted. xterm does this by default.
> But also the characters themselves must be translated from PC-DOS
> ("codepage 437") to the characters understood by your xterm
> (iso-8859-1 or utf-8).
>
> As a quick test, I tried some of the ansi art examples in
> http://www.acid.org/ftp/aaa-8991.zip on my utf-8 capable xterm,
> simply using iconv to convert codepage 437 to utf-8, e.g.:
>
> iconv -f 437 -t utf-8 tohs.ans
>

not bad at all with the font I normally use (terminus-12)

I tried smaller fonts but they don't seem to have all the box drawing
characters - in any case the results were not quite as good as with
terminus-12.

> I suppose that if you have a legacy xterm with iso-8859-1
> (unfortunately still the default in Debian) it would have to be


don't tell me.. I run debian sarge (stable) and try as I may I was never
able to install from source the "debian way". So I had to go through a
lot of contortions to install not just xterm but also recent versions of
screen, elinks, etc. without breaking my system.. hopefully..
>
> iconv -f 437 -t iso-8859-1 tohs.ans
>
> This gives some idea of what it should look like. It becomes better
> when you select reverse video (control-middle click, then select
> reverse video). But getting the true glory of ansi art, including the
> proper colour scheme, would require a specially-written filter, I
> think.


I ran it on a 256-color xterm.. not sure whether that helps, though..
>
> The easiest is to just use the TYPE command in an ms-dos environment
> (dosemu) with ansi.sys.


... easiest for someone that has a degree of familiarity with dos. I'm
sure installing dosemu is no big deal on a debian box.. presumably a
simple apt-get install would do it.. but then, I would have to
initialize some form of dos file system.. import the .ans files.. not
easy when you have zero experience with dos.. :-)
>
> Regards, Jan


Thanks much.

cga


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I am haveing the same problem here as discussed previously.

i am trying to run scrollz irc client in an xterm, with a colorful ansi art script loading that produces very eye catching graphics. (the reason i have allways used scrollz for irc client).

this is something that has allways worked before, all i ever had to do was install the xfonts-dosemu package, and use one of the fonts that draws those characters correctly.
there are a few of them.

anyways, upon a recent reinstall of etch with upgrade to sid, i am running into this stupid problem of UTF8 and whatever it is that breaks my program from displaying correctly in an xterm environment. i tried changeing my locales to ISO-8859-1, but that doesnt fix it.

can someone please tell me what to do to make this work again?

thanx




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