[gentoo-user] Missing line-drawing characters on re-install

[Michael]

I'm b-a-a-a-a-ck... on my regular desktop. I re-installed with
unicode enabled and locale corrected. Some rough edges, specifically no
line-drawing characters. See attached image. Mutt is supposed to have
horizontal lines from right after the ")" up to the ">". Similarly mc
is supposed to have vertical and horizontal line drawing characters
separating and surrounding the two panels. I can use "mc -a" to get a
decent emulation with "+", "_", and "|" in place of line-drawing
characters. Similarly mutt has the "set ascii_chars" option to get an
ugly version of line-threading. Since this problem shows up on more
than one app, I assume that it's a general system problem. Any ideas on
how to get real line-drawing characters back?

I can't recall what else you have eliminated as the cause of this rendering
problem. Have you checked:

1. VT console.
2. Different terminal (urxvt, xterm, gnome terminal, konsole, etc.).
3. Different DE/Window Manager.

Also may be worth trying Wayland as opposed to Xorg, in case the video card
driver likes one more than the other.

[Walter Dnes]

Post by Michael
I can't recall what else you have eliminated as the cause of this
1. VT console.
2. Different terminal (urxvt, xterm, gnome terminal, konsole, etc.).
3. Different DE/Window Manager.

A bit of digging. For text tty's (tty1, tty2, etc) I use solar24x32
as the font. On a text tty both mc and mutt work fine (line-drawing)
natively without any hacks. They also work fine on urxvt without any
hacks. Note that the ebuild that provides urxvt is called, wait for it,

rxvt-unicode

It looks like urxvt is designed from square 1 to handle unicode, and
xterm is not.

[Michael]

Post by Walter Dnes

Post by Michael
I can't recall what else you have eliminated as the cause of this
1. VT console.
2. Different terminal (urxvt, xterm, gnome terminal, konsole, etc.).
3. Different DE/Window Manager.

A bit of digging. For text tty's (tty1, tty2, etc) I use solar24x32
as the font. On a text tty both mc and mutt work fine (line-drawing)
natively without any hacks. They also work fine on urxvt without any
hacks. Note that the ebuild that provides urxvt is called, wait for it,
rxvt-unicode
It looks like urxvt is designed from square 1 to handle unicode, and
xterm is not.

OKie dOKie, it is a terminal rendering issue then. I'm not on a PC with mutt
right now, so can't confirm, but these are the xterm USE flags I use here:

~ $ equery u x11-terms/xterm
[ Legend : U - final flag setting for installation]
[ : I - package is installed with flag ]
[ Colors : set, unset ]
* Found these USE flags for x11-terms/xterm-376:
U I
- - Xaw3d : Add support for the 3d athena widget set
+ + openpty : Use openpty() in preference to posix_openpt()
- - sixel : Enable sixel graphics support
- - toolbar : Enable the xterm toolbar to be built
+ + truetype : Add support for FreeType and/or FreeType2 fonts
+ + unicode : Add support for Unicode
- - verify-sig : Verify upstream signatures on distfiles
- - xinerama : Add support for querying multi-monitor screen geometry
through the Xinerama API

I rarely use xterm and can't recall how it behaves with mutt, so I'm not sure
if the above flags would make any difference. If xterm is your favourite
terminal you may want to give these flags a spin.

[Walter Dnes]

Post by Michael
I rarely use xterm and can't recall how it behaves with mutt, so I'm
not sure if the above flags would make any difference. If xterm is
your favourite terminal you may want to give these flags a spin.

I've already tried xterm with +/- unicode. No difference. I may have
to migrate to urxvt.