[tlug] Re: UTF-8 Terminal Emulators?

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

Ryan Shaw <ryan.shaw@example.com> writes:

> Lately I've been working with Tcl/Tk code that returns UTF-8
> strings, and I'd like to be able to display UTF-8 debugging info in
> my terminal window.
>
> I've tried using "xterm -u8" but I get empty boxes when I try to
> print UTF-8 strings.

You need to specify suitable fonts. Which fonts are suitable depends
on what parts of Unicode you want to display.

For example the following pair of 18 pixel fonts is quite good:

    LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 xterm -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1 -fw -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-ja-18-120-100-100-c-180-iso10646-1

these fonts are already contained in XFree86 4.x (contributed by
Markus Kuhn) and they cover a considerable part of Unicode (Japanese
and Korean are covered, Chinese is partly covered).

> Is there something else I need to set to get this to work? I'd like
> to avoid setting my LC_CTYPE to ja_JP.UTF-8, if possible.

LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 works just as well if you only want to display
Japanese but don't need to input it.

Another UTF-8 capable terminal emulator is mlterm, it's home page is

    http://mlterm.sourceforge.net/

an rpm for SuSE Linux 7.3 is here:

    ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mfabian/7.3-i386/mlterm-2.3.1-30.i386.rpm
    ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mfabian/7.3-src/mlterm-2.3.1-30.src.rpm

(in SuSE Linux 8.0 mlterm is already included).

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。