#28 longstanding unicode problem

[John Doe]

Worker has a longstanding issue with unicode fonts. The case is, for fonts that don't have required unicode characters, when selected with xft, missing unicode characters are displayed as boxes. In case of x11 font selected with iso10646 all characters were displayed as garbage character.
Now, i've tried a few terminal emulators and they can substitute unavalible unicode characters, and display iso646 xfont correctly so that's that.

Also interestigly i have been working around this for a long time by disabling xft, removing every x11 font from my system, except for terminus(the offending font) and jis, and setting fonts to ---medium-r-normal--14----c--iso8859-1 in worker.
This somehow correctly selects both terminus for english characters and missing cjk characters from jis.

[Ralf Hoffmann]

In X11 font mode you can enter a comma-separated list of x11 font names to fill up for missing characters. The dialog shows the number of character sets missing with the current font selection. You can choose your favourite font and then edit the name and add ",*" to the name. The asterisk basically tells x11 to use any font for the otherwise missing character sets. That may reduce the problems even though I still have experienced issues. It also may help being a little bit more specific about the second font name to control the font size etc. The tool xfontsel can help finding a good combination.
In XFT font mode you can still enter other font names than the preselected ones but the dialog does not offer much help. I don't have much experience with non-latin fonts however. Any hints are welcome.

[John Doe]

Yep, comma separated font name input does work nicely, thank you. I didn't really have a problem, just thought this might be some obscure bug you haven't encountered.

Maybe you should put the info about comma separated syntax on the font configuration page in documentation(unless it's some very common x11 knowledge)? Some people who don't know about it might be going crazy over this.

[John Doe]

so, continuing with this - is there a way to select multiple xft fonts?

edit - just comma with no space

[John Doe]

there's also some sort of a bug with japanese characters.

every program that uses xft displays them properly for latin fonts

worker shows squares instead

quriously, japanese characters are displayed normally if you select japanese font, and latin fallback is displayed normally as well, but you can't configure the fallback!

without xft worker shows blank space instead of any characters on up to date terminus

[Ralf Hoffmann]

Can you provide a small text file with those characters within the file name and the actual content so I can try to reproduce the problem?
Also, there is no way of selecting multiple xft fonts, at least I'm not aware of that.

[John Doe]

sure, here you go.

i personally just put the older version of terminus into /share/fonts as separate font and set up xorg to read it instead of newer one. this way i have fontconfig providing new one for everything and x11 version for worker.

you should probably just experiment with xft and english/japanese characters combo - if we can specify a list of fonts for fontconfig to lookup characters from there should be no problem, end users will then be able to use whatever characters they want.

also, Ralf, you're doing god's work. worker is the hands down best file manager in existance.