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Re: PuTTY charsets (was: Web frontend?)



Hi Todd!

 On Monday, May 22, 2006 at 15:57:39 -0400, Todd Zullinger wrote:

> either square boxes or strange symbols instead of the thread tree
> characters.

    One square box per ACS char, it's just the font shouting « No such
glyph here! ». Strange symbols, it depends on how many and which ones.


> What's ACS referring to in this context?

    Alternate Character Set, where the line drawing and some symbols
are. For PuTTY with TERM=putty it's the vt100-like scheme where ^N
switches to ACS, then a subset of Ascii chars are transmutated into
symbols, and ^O switches back to normal.

| $ printf "\033(B\033)0"                               # init
| $ printf "\016 \`afgjklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ \017"       # all 25 ACS


> with ncmpc (line drawing characters are wrong using UTF-8, but work
> with ISO8859-1)

    For some (pre)historical reasons I don't quite understand, probably
just dumbly following the behaviour of some ancestor, many terminals
(including PuTTY) have the ^N ACS scheme disabled when in UTF-8 mode. So
apps in an UTF-8 locale have to do a specific treatment, calling line
drawing chars directly by their UTF-8 code. Or the terminfo has to use
some trick instead, say switch to CP-437 and send hi-bit codes, or use a
direct-to-font access, or some such. Otherwise line drawing appear as an
Ascii letter.


Bye!    Alain.
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