Re: [spr29414] Help getting CLIM to display Greek characters

Dear Charley,

Many thanks for your response.  It helped a great deal in clarifying
our understanding of the implementation, and especially how to start
looking for possible problem causes.

In the end, it turned out to be sufficient to set the locale
appropriately (i.c. el_GR) and set the proper Emacs language
environment ('Greek), as far as ACL and ELI is concerned.

The main obstacle was a variable in the application telling it how to
read/write hash tables from/to a file.  Once that was set correctly,
the data were written and read in the correct encoding, and they were
properly displayed.

It also worked fine in UTF-8 (after appropriate conversion of the
input files), with the exception that the characters in Emacs did not
display correctly (but that is be fixed easily by providing Emacs with
an -fn option).  CLIM showed the text fine.  

(One minor glitch, probably in the font definitions: Greek has two
characters for (lowercase) "s", one for at the end of words, and one
for all other positions.  The former one does not show correctly.)

Many thanks,

Frederik Fouvry


,-- On Fri, 1 Oct 2004 15:25:45 -0700, Charles A. Cox wrote:
| 

[...]

|   We might need some more information to understand this problem.
| However, keep in mind that the external-formats' purpose is to convert
| external character sets, such as utf-8 and latin7, to/from 16-bit
| Unicode.  Inside Lisp, 16-bit Unicode only is used, so string
| comparisons in Lisp, etc. should be independent of the
| external-format.
| 
| > Annoying (and not just unexpected) is that the (UTF-8) output
| > that is shown in the CLIM window is interpreted as iso-8859-1,
| > which makes it unreadable.  I suspect there is some setting
| > missing that tells CLIM to interpret the strings as UTF-8.  The
| > question is: if that is so, what is it?
| 
|   The issue here seems to be the encoding expected by the font.  My
| understanding of X11 is that the fonts use iso8859 or jis encodings
| and not Unicode or utf-8.  So, to display Greek characters, you would
| need to use an iso8859-7 font and arrange to have the characters from
| Lisp transmitted using the iso8859-7 (latin7) external-format.  This
| should be the default external-format with the el_GR locale.

[...]