Re: changing to UTF-8

[Andrew Schulman <andrex@alumni.utexas.net>]

Thank you both for your help.

> You could try cleaning things up a bit with 'localepurge'

Looking at the package description, this doesn't seem like a good idea. And
anyway, my problem isn't that I have too many locales.  It seems to be a
font problem.

> $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Yes, I have tried this.  It resets /etc/locale.gen.

> $ cat /etc/default/locale 
> LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

$ cat /etc/default/locale
#  File generated by update-locale
LANG=en_US

I get the same result if it's LANG=en_US.UTF-8.

> $ env |egrep "(^LC|LANG)"
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> GDM_LANG=en_US.UTF-8

$ env |egrep "(^LC|LANG)"
LANG=en_US

> $ cat ~/.dmrc
> [Desktop]
> Session=gnome

$ cat ~/.dmrc
[Desktop]
Session=default

And note that I have

$ locale
LANG=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US"
LC_TIME="en_US"
LC_COLLATE="en_US"
LC_MONETARY="en_US"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US"
LC_PAPER="en_US"
LC_NAME="en_US"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US"
LC_ALL=

$ locale -a
C
en_US
en_US.iso88591
en_US.utf8
POSIX

$ egrep -v '^(#|$)' /etc/locale.gen
en_US UTF-8
en_US.ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

All of this is as it's supposed to be.  I try switching between en_US and
en_US.UTF-8, but it doesn't help.  I still see characters such as hyphens
(-), boldface pipes, and single quotes rendered as â (circumflex-a) in my
terminal windows.  If I set LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1, then the characters are
shown correctly.

I think this is a font problem, but I just don't know how to diagnose it.

Thanks,
Andrew.