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

[Chusslove Illich]

> [: Randy Kramer :]
> 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.

DejaVu itself is a fork of Bitstream's Vera, made with specific purpose of
implementing wide variety of scripts, through collaborative development.
dejavu.sourceforge.net would be the canonical source of this family of
fonts. I can't tell if that would make the difference, but it may be that
your system, given KDE 3.4.2, also provides a three year old version of
DejaVu.

> * 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.

Before DejaVu Sans & Monospace, I used the Tahoma & Courier New for the
desktop. And precisely the last drop before abandoning them for DejaVu, was
when Tahoma could not show some characters that started to be important to
me (e.g. non-breaking hyphen). DejaVu (i.e. Vera) and Tahoma were both
designed as UI fonts; DejaVu is now more complete in coverage and is further
developed, while Microsoft introduced a new, C-series of fonts with Vista,
of which I don't know much. Of the "old guard", I've heard Arial is very
complete too, but it wasn't exactly intended as a UI font.

> 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.

Indeed, I remember KDE doing some strange stuff when it couldn't sense UTF-8
system locale, so I tend to set these variables as a matter of habit
(actually, always c&p'ing my standard ~/.bashrc cruft around :)

> your name in your native language (what language is that) [...]

Serbian, Cyrillic script :) It's not a very good candidate for testing
fonts, as unless the font is specifically made to cover a certain script,
for general fonts Cyrillic alphabet is usually the first "extra" to go in.

-- 
Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-linux/attachments/20080609/efbfcb9d/attachment.sig>