xterm UTF-8 [LWN.net]

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 2:06 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263)
In reply to: New goodies omitted from the review by piman
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

I use Fedora 2 with the default xorg 6.7.0. The version of xterm included therein does indeed support UTF-8, but it can't display anything with complex characters such as Chinese (if you try, everything comes out as invisible square boxes).

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xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 4:28 UTC (Sat) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (4 responses)

That just means that the font xterm is using has no character to represent a given code point. Try a more complete font.

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 5:33 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (3 responses)

That just means that the font xterm is using has no character to represent a given code point. Try a more complete font.

Hey, thanks for the tip. I got xterm working with CJK using

xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1'

Not that I'll ever remember that specific font, but I know what to google for if I need it.

What I did notice, however, is that many (all?) of the fonts recommended by previous posters above do not include complete support for the particular unicode characters that I need. It seems that only a small subset of the fonts include such support, which is not ideal, although it sure is better than none.

That and the fact that CJK characters benefit greatly from antialiasing mean I'll stick with gnone-terminal, but at least now I know how to use xterm if I have to.

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 6:40 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

That and the fact that CJK characters benefit greatly from antialiasing

That's because you used -fn to specify fontname, which specifies an "old" core font name. Try using -fa instead, eg -fa fixed or -fa MiscFixed.

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 5, 2004 7:37 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (1 responses)

Interesting... on my unmodified Fedora 2 installation, neither of your suggested fonts for -fa gives antialiasing. What did work was "-fa Monospace", which produced subpixel antialiased fonts just like gnome-terminal. However, using this font, the chinese characters were again missing.

By this point in the thread it seems clear to me that xterm does have the features I mentioned, but they are not enabled by default and it is a nontrivial effort to get them all working together at the same time (at least on Fedora).

xterm UTF-8

Posted Jun 8, 2004 15:10 UTC (Tue) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link]

That's interesting. I hadn't realized there was anti-aliased font support
in xterm at all. But after playing with the -fa and -fs options for a while
I wasn't able to find any good terminal fonts. Most are not monospaced and
have too many serifs or are too wide for me to use. And xterm seems to
silently accept bad xft font names and just use an internal default. Is
there something like xfontsel for the FreeType fonts?