[kde-linux] Followup questions, thanks (was: Re: Encoding questions)

[Randy Kramer]

Chusslove (and everybody),

Thanks very much!  I've made quite a bit of progress based on your comments 
(I'll detail below), but I have one followup question (for anybody)

On Sunday 08 June 2008 08:35 pm, Chusslove Illich wrote:
> This is most likely the font missing glyphs, rather than issues with
> encoding; if it were encoding issue, you wouldn't be seeing blocks, but some
> letter-garbage.
> 
> Try with the ubiquitous DejaVu family (Serif/Sans/Monospace), which has a
> rather complete glyph set. At least I'm seeing your pronunciation example
> correctly with them.

This is where I've made the least progress and have a followup question, well 
maybe I even have the answer 

I decided to try to get this issue resolved in konqueror first before I try to 
fix it in kate.  I tried the 87 fonts that Mandriva seems to install by 
default, but only 6 of those display the missing character (glyph) (finally I 
see it, the upside down e).  I don't care too much for the fonts that show 
it, so I'll probably (eventually) look for some other fonts.

But, those 87 fonts include the DejaVu family (Serif/Sans/Monospace), and on 
my system, they don't display the upside down e (they display the box).  So, 
apparently, there are different "versions" (or subsets?) of those fonts.

Any suggestions on:
   * how to tell without testing a font whether it will display things like 
the upside down e?  I mean, if I tried to search on the web for another 
"version" of the DejaVu family which might display the upside down u, what 
should I look for?
   * any idea if the Microsoft TrueType fonts display most of the missing 
glyphs (I used to install those, afaict, I didn't when I installed Mandriva 
2006)--I'll probably try installing those tonight or tomorrow.
   * other?

> > The encoding on kate was [...] changed them both to utf-8 [...]
> > [...]
> > * many times when I copy and paste stuff from konqueror into kate and then
> > to to save the file, I get the message:
> 
> > "The selected encoding cannot encode every unicode character in this
> > document. Do you really want to save it? There could be some data lost."
> 
> This is quite strange, since you have set Kate to UTF-8 explicitly. How
> about trying under a different, pristine account?

I didn't try that, but I did try the following.

> Also, you might want to check if the system locale, as KDE session sees it,
> is set properly. Execute "env > envlist.txt" in minicli (Alt+F2), and in the
> envlist.txt file that got created in your home directory, look up variables
> LANG, LC_CTYPE, LC_ALL. At least one of them should be set, and to a locale
> which contains UTF-8 in its name. If not, check which files your distro
> sources on session start (e.g. ~/.bashrc), and set a locale by exporting
> e.g. LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 (LC_ALL has the highest priority). For the list of
> existing locales on your system, use "locale -a".

That was apparently the problem.  LANG and LC_CTYPE were set to en_US, and 
LC_ALL was not set at all.  I set LC_ALL to en_US.UTF-8 at the command line, 
then started an instance of kate, and it works fine in this respect.  (If I 
paste your name in your native language (what language is that), kate 
displays it just fine, saves it just fine, and after a save displays it again 
just fine (that was with my default font settings, which were very 
general--sans, monospace, serif, ...

Now I just have to add it to, say ~/.bashrc as you suggest, which I'll do a 
little later.

Thanks very much!
Randy Kramer


> 
> -- 
> Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)