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accented chars. shown as question marks in non-browser tools, sarge



Hi All,

On Mar 08 2007, H.S. wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> In Debian Etch Mozilla browser (Iceape), I notice that sometimes 
> accented characters are not displayed properly. They are shown as 
> question marks in black diamonds. For example, on this web page (CNN):
> http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1597226,00.html?cnn=yes
> 
> I see this "or his prot???g???s". I assume the last word is protege with 
> accents on the e's. How do I find out what I am missing to have these 
> characters shown properly? Maybe a font? My default locale is 
> en_CA.UTF-8 and many of the international languages are shown properly. 
> I even see accents properly on this web page:
> http://www.jw-stumpel.nl/stestu.html

I've got the same basic problem with just about every tool I use,
notably my email client mutt. Other versions of linux have somehow
automatically done the right thing - for the European ISO standard at
least (I forget the precise number), and their version of emacs would
also successfully cut and paste non-US-character text, and asked me what
encoding I preferred to use. Debian hasn't done the right thing since
sarge - I don't remember for sure whether woody worked right, or
whether my last good experience was on redhat - and I've had no luck
whatsoever finding documentation or a FAQ that actually corresponded
to anything real and workable. (Don't tell me to process 'locales'
that don't exist on my system, without at least giving me a clue what
package might contain them - or how to create my own - given that I've
installed every relevant-seeming package for every language I want to
be able to read.)

Etch _claimed_ to default to UTF-8 - not my preference, but any
consistent and working setup is better than nothing - and I need to
check whether _that_ encoding actually works. (How can I find some
text that's definitely encoded in that format?) But what I want is the
ability to read anything. Well, anything in any European language,
with emphasis on french, german, and icelandic, plus a few related
dead languages.) 

Using a windows XP box for all my non-english language work is *not*
making me happy.

-- 
Arlie

(Arlie Stephens	                              arlie@worldash.org)



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