Dotan Cohen wrote:
> Ah, Mutt is known not to work with Hebrew.
Mutt works fine. The problem, if one exists, is what font the
terminal is using in which mutt is running. The font must support
UTF-8 or it can't display those characters properly. If someone is
using a classic 9x15 ASCII font for example it will be unable to
display the extended characters. The "gibberish" text will only
display as a row of dashes and spaces.
> א-ב-ג-ד-ה-ו-ז-ח-ט-י-ך-כ-ל-ם-מ-ן-נ-ס-ע-ף-פ-ץ-צ-ק-ר-ש-ת
I see all of the characters in mutt and in emacs editing this reply
but only because I am running inside of an xterm that is using a
Unicode font. When I send this with mutt it will attempt to send
using us-ascii and failing that it will attempt to send using
iso-8859-1 and if that fails it will send it in UTF-8. That is the
default encoding order because it reflects the widest support
available. It is possible to change the ordering in mutt using the
send_charset variable such as in this following. (But I usually leave
it the default value since that seems to work okay too.)
# Default: "us-ascii:iso-8859-1:utf-8"
set send_charset="us-ascii:utf-8"
In order to try out UTF-8 in a temporary way try this following set of
commands. First install some Unicode fonts.
sudo apt-get install xfonts-efont-unicode xfonts-efont-unicode-ib
That will get some basic Unicode fonts onto the machine. Then look at
the docs that have been installed. The README.Debian file has some
very good information.
pager /usr/share/doc/xfonts-efont-unicode/README.Debian
Basically: -efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
Then to try it temporarily (use an appropriate UTF-8 LANG, I am using
en_US.UTF-8 but that is just for the example, and this illustrates my
Unix mind-set that the sort order should be standard order and not
dictionary order by setting LC_COLLATE too):
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=C xterm -fn -efont-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-75-75-c-80-iso10646-1
That should bring up an xterm with Unicode support and a Unicode
font. Running mutt or emacs or so forth in such a terminal should be
enabled for full UTF-8 characters.
The xlsfonts command can be used to list out fonts that match
patterns. Something like the following is interesting. (And leads me
to wonder why there are no 18 or 20 point fonts in the efont package?)
xlsfonts -fn '-*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1'
For better or for worse I settled on using the following in my
personal ~/.Xresources file to configure XTerm. It is all very much
personal taste. These work well for me but I know that everyone has
their own preferences. YMMV and all of that.
XTerm*font:-efont-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-75-75-c-80-iso10646-1
XTerm*Font2:-efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*Font3:-efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*Font4:-efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*Font5:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*Font6:-efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*fontMenu*fontdefault*Label:Default 16
XTerm*fontMenu*font1*Label:Unreadable 2
XTerm*fontMenu*font2*Label:Tiny 12
XTerm*fontMenu*font3*Label:Small 14
XTerm*fontMenu*font4*Label:Medium 16
XTerm*fontMenu*font5*Label:Large 18
XTerm*fontMenu*font6*Label:Huge 24
I am sure that the GNOME and KDE folks have similar settings available
to them. I am using FVWM and XTerm.
Also I have installed a *LOT* of other fonts. They are a very large
disk hog. But I like to be able to see text as intended to be
displayed. Also it is nice to see WikiPedia pages with all of the
correct symbols and without all of the missing font boxes. I am still
missing a few but most of them are visible to me. :-)
apt-cache search ttf- | grep ^ttf-
Bob
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