[TF] Displaying Extended Characters

[lucifer at lightbearer.c. (J. Aelwyn)]

On Tuesday, June 20, 2006 06:17, Korthrun wrote:
> On 6/17/06, Mephator <mephator at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Dear TF List,
> >
> > I use TF to connect to a few MUDs. Recently, one has made some changes to
> > allow the useage of extended ASCII codes, like solid blocks or
> > upside-down question marks. This doesn't display so well in TF. On
> > Windows systems the general solution is to use a different client that
> > uses the Terminal font, but I'm running TF from a Linux box console, no
> > GUI involved.
> >
> > Does anybody have any suggestions on how to get TF to display these
> > characters? Is there a font I could use, or perhaps a modification of TF
> > itself? I appreciate any help that is offered.
> >
> > Rick
>
> Try:
> /setenv LC_CTYPE=en_US
> If it works toss it in  your .tfrc

Of course, that will only help if the MUDs happen to be using ISO-8859-*1* 
(a.k.a. ISO-Latin-1, the ISO-8859 charset for en_US and most other 'Western 
European' languages), rather than, say, CP-1252, or worse, Windows-1252. I'm 
hazarding a guess (having mucked in the internals of a few MU* servers) that 
they're probably not sending UTF-8, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, 
given it's TF and TF hasn't even the beginnings of UTF-8 support, yet, last I 
looked).

If the problem is that your terminal doesn't support any non-ASCII characters 
at all, then set LC_CTYPE=C (explicitly, "just in case", though a blank value 
is supposed to default to this anyway) which should, at least in theory, 
cause TF to consider any characters with the high bit set to be 'unprintable' 
(what happens then depends on your %emulation setting, of course, and TF is 
only as good as your C library, mostly, when deciding "non-printable").

Of course, unless your system is exceedingly starved for memory and disk, 
you'll probably have a more pleasant experience if you fire up a basic X 
server and one of the various X-based terminal applications. If you configure 
it for truly minimal, and don't fire up any "suite" applications (KDE, Gnome, 
etc.), it can still fit into an impressively small memory footprint, and the 
only terminals I know of that most people might *ever* see that it can't do 
some sort of display on are (A) true VT-100/102/220 units, or (B) teletypes.

If you've really found a (graphical) exception, throw it down as a challenge 
to the geeks, and *someone* will probably take you up on it. Especially if 
you offer them development hardware. :)
-- 
Joel Aelwyn <lucifer at lightbearer.com>
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