Re: [dwm] unicode characters in status

On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 12:01:03PM +0100, Anselm R. Garbe wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 11:47:35AM +0100, Anthony Brown wrote:
> > Yep, works for me (I can't check the russian though, no cyrillic fonts
> > installed).
>
> Well, I noticed an annoyance with 'fixed' which is not UTF-8
> capable in my environment if I not use
> -*-fixed-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*
> explicitely ;(((

I investigated further and I think the current implementation is
totally right and correct.

If a user uses 'fixed' (default configuration), but en_US.UTF-8
locale, in most cases fixed is mapped to en_US.ISO8859-1
(Latin1), hence the rendering will look like shit, because the
used font is not capable to map correctly to UTF-8.

You can easily check with ls | dmenu, if you use en_US.UTF-8 as
locale.

To get correct results when using fixed, you can recheck with:

export LC_ALL=en_US.ISO8859-1
ls|dmenu

(in that situation dmenu works correct).

Same with dwm.

However, people will use the default ('fixed') setup with
incompatible locales, so I ask, what might be a good solution,
that they don't believe dwm or dmenu is faulty...

I'm not sure if something like a -u toggle for dwm and dmenu
could be considered useful for such people, which has the effect
to disable the whole locale/UTF-8 handling. But who uses such
locales still today? Or in other words, who uses a font which is
not compatible with the locale in use? Shall we ignore the
problem?

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe >< http://suckless.org/~arg/ >< GPG key: 0D73F361