Bug#219551: Unicode xterms should do some kind of substitution for missing characters
On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 11:15:04PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
| On Sat, Nov 08, 2003 at 12:09:16PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
| > I nevertheless maintain that if the requested glyph /isn't/ available,
| > it is more useful to display some approximation of the requested
| > character than a little white box.
|
| Uh, you seem to be rather glibly overlooking the requirements involved
| in "displaying some approximation of the requested character".
Possibly I am. But if other programs can do it, at least for some
subset of characters, there's no purely technical reason why xterm
cannot. Whether or not it /should/ is another matter, and I admit that
it may be ON MUCH shakier ground.
| > Yes, that sounds like a good idea. I'd be surprised if there weren't
| > libraries around that fall down the Unicode slippery slope already.
| > Mozilla already handles this kind of thing. So do gvim and
| > gnome-terminal, which suggests that it might be GTK in general that
| > handles it. It is even conceivable that the Unicode-handling library
| > might be separate from GTK itself; if that is the case, xterm may be
| > able to link to it?
|
| That may be a bad idea.
Yes, I suppose it may be - I was just throwing ideas around. I take it
that you had some reasoning which led you to believe that the idea is
bad, in which case it would be appreciated if you could explain why you
think so rather than just vaguely suggesting so.
| Even if it isn't, it might be a good idea if the fonts in question
| troubled themselves to define a glyph for the codepoint.
|
| I trust you've filed a bug to that effect.
AFAIK most of the Free fonts packaged in Debian have the particular
glyph that this bug report mentioned. The one I'm using is from
msttcorefonts, so I can't imagine anyone is likely to be able to do
anything about a Debian bug files on it.
Cheers,
Cameron.
Reply to: