Bug#219551: Unicode xterms should do some kind of substitution for missing characters
On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 12:37:43PM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:
| > 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
|
| Then gnome-terminal is broken and deservers a bug report.
I disagree. gnome-terminal is behaving as intended, i.e., displaying
the nearest character to a hyphen present in the font it was instructed
to use.
Incidentally, below are screenshots of "man rm" on three different
terminal emulators. In order of increasing brokenness of display:
http://cp.yi.org/cameron/hyphen/gnome-terminal.png
http://cp.yi.org/cameron/hyphen/xterm.png
http://cp.yi.org/cameron/hyphen/konsole.png
| > contain the former. Konsole and xterm do not. xterm is my preferred
|
| They should not. They implement an UTF-8 terminal correctly,
| gnome-terminal does not if I follow your explanation.
gnome-terminal, like other GTK2 apps, deals gracefully with fonts with
missing characters. Konsole, like other KDE/Qt apps, does not.
| Though I could imagine this character replacement as an option, so the
| user may enable it he likes it.
Implementing it as optional would be possible, I suppose, but I fail to
see why anyone would enable an option which gives them an inferior
display.
| > 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.
|
| Hyphens are not missing. They are meant to be hyphens and should be
| presented as hyphens and not as some other char.
They are missing in the font that I am using. Thus they are /not/
displayed as hyphens, they are displayed as little boxes. Presenting
them as minus signs is certainly preferable to refusing to display them
at all.
| > | 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.
|
| That will be the only sane workaround except of fixing the actual
| problems in the manpages.
No. There is no problem with manpages using hyphens. If a font
contains separate hyphens and minus signs, they should be presented as
hyphens in UTF-8 locales, too. If a font does /not/ contain a hyphen
character, displaying them as the closest approximation that is
contained in that font, or perhaps even as a hyphen from another font,
is the Right Thing to do.
Cheers,
Cameron.
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