Re: cairo and character encoding issues

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 23 November 2007 18:21, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> > >      setlocale (LC_ALL, "");
> > 
> > Isn't there one already?
> > Or at any rate a call to setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")?  
> > When I enter gnuplot it correctly knows about the locale:
> > 
> > lascaux [1235] ./gnuplot...
> 
> > gnuplot> show locale
> > 
> >         LC_CTYPE is en_US.UTF-8
> >         LC_TIME is C
> 
> That's what I see here too, but g_get_charset(), called in 
> gp_cairo.c, is getting ANSI_X3.4-1968 (ascii).  

Something is broken, it seems. But I really don't know what.

> The GLib reference says,
> "A number of interfaces in GLib depend on the current locale in 
> which an application is running. Therefore, most GLib-using 
> applications should call setlocale (LC_ALL, "")

We most definitely do not want LC_ALL, as that will mess with
the time/date and numerical formats also.  We have separate
commands to load LC_TIME and LC_NUMERIC. 

> I tried sticking that exact invocation into gp_cairo.c, prior to 
> the call to g_get_charset, and the latter then found UTF-8 OK.

Possibly that pins down the brokeness.
Setting LC_CTYPE should do exactly what we want - set the character encoding.
But LC_ALL may be [incorrectly] required by some library instead of the more
specific LC_CTYPE?


-- 
Ethan A Merritt