Bug#219551: Unicode xterms should do some kind of substitution for missing characters
On Sat, Nov 08, 2003 at 09:03:49PM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:
| > Many TrueType fonts don't have both a hyphen (0x2010) and a minus sign
| > (0x2212); however, groff (and thus man pages) differentiates between the
| > two in UTF-8 locales. This results in lots of man pages displaying ugly
| > boxes where hyphens should be in a uxterm, but displaying fine on a
| > 'normal' xterm where there is no distinction between the two characters.
|
| That's not a problem with the certain terminal emulator, that is a
| problem with groff syntax not understood by many authors. Xterm works
| just fine as UTF-8 terminal as well as mlterm/pterm/konsole/gnome-terminal
| but the manpages simply specify the wrong char.
That may be so, but gnome-terminal /does/ cope with this situation by
displaying replacing the hyphen with a minus sign when the font doesn't
contain the former. Konsole and xterm do not. xterm is my preferred
terminal emulator and it would be nice to see it cope gracefully with
incomplete fonts---and after all, I would imagine that in the majority
of fonts there exists some Unicode character which is missing and
another similar character which could be substituted for it.
| It was promised that groff will recode hyphen to minus sign in some
| future version (maybe as an option) to work around broken manpages.
That would be a workaround for this particular case - which is admittedly
the only that I've noticed.
Cheers,
Cameron.
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