Bug#418324: xterm: baffling weirdness with 9x15 font and some Unicode glyphs
Package: xterm
Version: 222-3
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream
This is an upstream issue, I'll wager.
The root of my complaint is that the Unicode glyphs LEFT-POINTING ANGLE
BRACKET (U+2329) and RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET (U+232A) don't render
when I size my xterms up to the "Large" font. This was brought to my
attention because GNU roff renders URLs between these glyphs in UTF-8
environments. (On a Debian system, an example of a manpage that uses the
.URL macro is "update-fonts-alias", but there are many others.)
At first I thought this was just an oversight in the 9x15 font, as those
glyphs render fine. So fired up gbdfed to have a look, intending to draw
my own glyphs and submit a patch.
Imagine my surprise when I found that the font does define glyphs there.
Next I thought, well, maybe the bounding box is wrong, or it's declared as
a normal-width character but is really double-width. Those guesses appear
to be wrong, too:
STARTCHAR angleleft
ENCODING 9001
SWIDTH 576 0
DWIDTH 9 0
BBX 9 15 0 -3
BITMAP
0000
0000
0400
0400
0800
0800
1000
1000
0800
0800
0400
0400
0000
0000
0000
ENDCHAR
STARTCHAR angleright
ENCODING 9002
SWIDTH 576 0
DWIDTH 9 0
BBX 9 15 0 -3
BITMAP
0000
0000
1000
1000
0800
0800
0400
0400
0800
0800
1000
1000
0000
0000
0000
ENDCHAR
I'm not really clear on what SWIDTH and DWIDTH are, but they (and the
bounding box "BBOX") are the same as glyph 9000 (U+2328 "KEYBOARD"), which
renders fine.
So then I thought maybe it's a bug in xterm. After floundering a bit,
because konsole doesn't want to play with bitmap fonts and fails to
"install" them when its convoluted dialogs offer to, and gnome-terminal
wanted to install a few dozen megs of dependencies, including Epiphrany and
dvd+rw-tools (?!), I settled on rxvt-unicode-ml.
I was in for another surprise. urxvt displays the glyphs correctly -- but
then so does xterm, when I launch it manually! (Usually I just let the
session manager start all the xterms I use.) What's more, both urxvt and
xterm suddenly forget how to render U+2328 and U+232B ("ERASE TO THE
LEFT"), which my usual xterms that can't render angle brackets handle just
fine!
There is one difference between urxvt and xterm -- the angle bracket glyphs
I *do* get look right on urxvt, but xterm is showing me some ugly stuff
that reminds me of the semigraphics characters on the TRS-80 Model I.
I've worked with X for a long time but this has me stumped.
What on earth is going on?
Here's my $HOME/.Xresources; as you can see, I don't change XTerm's fonts:
! Personal Xresources file
XClipboard*Form*Text*font: fixed
XConsole.verbose: true
XConsole*iconic: false
XConsole*geometry: 1272x89+0-58
XConsole*saveLines: 1000
XConsole*font: 6x10
XTerm*autoWrap: true
XTerm*curses: true
XTerm*loginShell: true
XTerm*reverseWrap: true
XTerm*scrollBar: true
XTerm*saveLines: 5000
XTerm*scrollTtyOutput: false
XTerm*trimSelection: true
XTerm*visualBell: true
XTerm*activeIcon: true
XTerm.VT100.background: gray30
XTerm.VT100.foreground: gray90
XTerm.VT100.geometry: 200x67-0+0
XTerm.VT100.color4: DodgerBlue1
XTerm.VT100.color8: gray50
XTerm.VT100.color12: SteelBlue1
XTerm.VT100.scrollbar.background: white
XTerm.VT100.scrollbar.foreground: blue
UXTerm*autoWrap: true
UXTerm*curses: true
UXTerm*loginShell: true
UXTerm*reverseWrap: true
UXTerm*scrollBar: true
UXTerm*saveLines: 5000
UXTerm*scrollTtyOutput: false
UXTerm*trimSelection: true
UXTerm*visualBell: true
UXTerm*activeIcon: true
UXTerm.VT100.background: gray30
UXTerm.VT100.foreground: gray90
UXTerm.VT100.geometry: 200x67-0+0
UXTerm.VT100.color4: DodgerBlue1
UXTerm.VT100.color8: gray50
UXTerm.VT100.color12: SteelBlue1
UXTerm.VT100.scrollbar.background: white
UXTerm.VT100.scrollbar.foreground: blue
XCalc*IconName: xcalc
XLock.star.delay: 20000
XLock.star.batchcount: 100
XLock.star.saturation: 1.0
XLock.star.rock: on
XLock.star.trek: 0
! vim:ai:noet:sts=8:sw=8:tw=0:
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
APT prefers oldstable
APT policy: (500, 'oldstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-powerpc-smp
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Versions of packages xterm depends on:
ii libc6 2.3.6.ds1-13 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libfontconfig1 2.4.2-1.2 generic font configuration library
ii libice6 1:1.0.1-2 X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii libncurses5 5.5-5 Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii libsm6 1:1.0.1-3 X11 Session Management library
ii libx11-6 2:1.0.3-7 X11 client-side library
ii libxaw7 1:1.0.2-4 X11 Athena Widget library
ii libxext6 1:1.0.1-2 X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii libxft2 2.1.8.2-8 FreeType-based font drawing librar
ii libxmu6 1:1.0.2-2 X11 miscellaneous utility library
ii libxt6 1:1.0.2-2 X11 toolkit intrinsics library
ii xbitmaps 1.0.1-2 Base X bitmaps
Versions of packages xterm recommends:
ii xutils 1:7.1.ds.3-1 X Window System utility programs
-- no debconf information
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