use of graphics characters recently disabled in xterm

[Theodore Kilgore]

Thomas,

Thank you very much. I was not aware uxterm and I will look into it.

However, to compound the ironies of this situation, I live in Auburn, 
Alabama. Hurricane Irma blew into town yesterday afternoon. By then, it 
was not much of a storm any more. My original suspicion was almost right, 
that it would miss us altogether and get pushed to the east because we had 
been in a high pressure area with coolish temperatures. But, I suspect, 
the previous high pressure and cool weather are what did in the hurricane 
so quickly.

But Irma did turn my power off for four hours yesterday by dropping a tree 
somewhere in the neighborhood, leaving the street without electricity. The 
computer was on when this happened. And four hours later when it was 
re-started, the problem we have been discussing had gone away. I do not 
know how this could be the case because to reboot after an upgrade is 
supposed to be a Windows thing, not required in Linux except to replace 
the kernel.

With due acknowledgement of the human suffering caused by Irma, it seems 
that an old saying is justified again. It's an ill wind indeed that blows 
no one any good.

So, let's close this thread for now, and reopen it only if the problem 
comes back.

Cheers,

Theodore Kilgore


On Tue, 12 Sep 2017, Thomas Dickey wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 11:03:23AM -0500, Theodore Kilgore wrote:
>>
>> Thomas,
>>
>> The output of locale (invoked without arguments) is as follows,
>> between the two lines.
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>> kilgota at khayyam:/etc/X11/app-defaults$ locale |less
>> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
>> LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_COLLATE=C
>> LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
>> LC_ALL=
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Those settings should work (the important ones are LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE, LANG).
>
>> There is a line called "line-drawing characters" which is *not*
>> turned on. It is unclear to me what this does (see the xterm man
>> page for an explanation, which is not totally clear). What it might
>> be doing is turning on the line-drawing characters from X itself, to
>> replace the ones which are provided by the font, or alternatively
>> what it might be doing is enabling the line-drawing characters which
>> are already provided by the font. As I said, the explanation in the
>> man page is not very clear and these two meanings are obviously
>> opposite to each other. In any event, to toggle this setting on and
>> off all by itself, when other settings are not changed, seems to
>> have no effect.
>>
>> There are also lines in that menu for UTF-8 Encoding, UTF-8 Fonts,
>> and UTF-8 Titles. These are also apparently not turned on (no check
>> marks in front).
>>
>> Setting UTF-Encoding *and* UTF-8 Fonts *and* Line-Drawing Characters
>> all to be on seems to solve the problem. But by default all three of
>> them are turned off.
>>
>> Why are all three of these settings turned off by default? I have no
>
> Line-Drawing is normally turned off because a well-designed font will
> look better than xterm's built-in equivalent (since it may use thick
> lines for large characters).
>
> UTF-8 Fonts would be turned on if you used the "uxterm" shell script
> to setup xterm, which gives better coverage of Unicode.
>
> UTF-8 Encoding isn't on either because there's some problem with the locale
> _tables_ or due to a resource setting.  If you have "appres" installed,
> you may see the problem in the output of "appres XTerm".
>
>> idea. In particular, this is even more amazing because it seems to
>> be in conflict with the locale settings displayed above. So, in
>> order to get back to the bottom of this problem it seems to me that
>> what needs to be done is to set up a way to turn all three of these
>> settings on. However, I do not know what I am supposed to do in
>> order to carry that out. Change some configuration file, I suppose,
>> or else do a local override. But I suspect that the settings are
>> already set correctly in some file somewhere and that somehow the
>> settings in that file are being ignored.
>
> I'd try using the "uxterm" script (it's supposed to do most of the
> fixes you need).
>
> -- 
> Thomas E. Dickey <dickey at invisible-island.net>
> http://invisible-island.net
> ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net
>