Re: use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm

On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 11:03:23AM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote:
> 
> Thomas,
> 
> The output of locale (invoked without arguments) is as follows,
> between the two lines.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> kilgota@khayyam:/etc/X11/app-defaults$ locale |less
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_COLLATE=C
> LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_ALL=
> -------------------------------------------------------------------

Those settings should work (the important ones are LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE, LANG).
 
> There is a line called "line-drawing characters" which is *not*
> turned on. It is unclear to me what this does (see the xterm man
> page for an explanation, which is not totally clear). What it might
> be doing is turning on the line-drawing characters from X itself, to
> replace the ones which are provided by the font, or alternatively
> what it might be doing is enabling the line-drawing characters which
> are already provided by the font. As I said, the explanation in the
> man page is not very clear and these two meanings are obviously
> opposite to each other. In any event, to toggle this setting on and
> off all by itself, when other settings are not changed, seems to
> have no effect.
> 
> There are also lines in that menu for UTF-8 Encoding, UTF-8 Fonts,
> and UTF-8 Titles. These are also apparently not turned on (no check
> marks in front).
> 
> Setting UTF-Encoding *and* UTF-8 Fonts *and* Line-Drawing Characters
> all to be on seems to solve the problem. But by default all three of
> them are turned off.
> 
> Why are all three of these settings turned off by default? I have no

Line-Drawing is normally turned off because a well-designed font will
look better than xterm's built-in equivalent (since it may use thick
lines for large characters).

UTF-8 Fonts would be turned on if you used the "uxterm" shell script
to setup xterm, which gives better coverage of Unicode.

UTF-8 Encoding isn't on either because there's some problem with the locale
_tables_ or due to a resource setting.  If you have "appres" installed,
you may see the problem in the output of "appres XTerm".

> idea. In particular, this is even more amazing because it seems to
> be in conflict with the locale settings displayed above. So, in
> order to get back to the bottom of this problem it seems to me that
> what needs to be done is to set up a way to turn all three of these
> settings on. However, I do not know what I am supposed to do in
> order to carry that out. Change some configuration file, I suppose,
> or else do a local override. But I suspect that the settings are
> already set correctly in some file somewhere and that somehow the
> settings in that file are being ignored.

I'd try using the "uxterm" script (it's supposed to do most of the
fixes you need).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <[email protected]>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net

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