Re: various problems resulting from version 1.7.1

[Andy Koppe <andy dot koppe at gmail dot com>]

2010/1/12 Nellis, Kenneth:
> Thank you, Jeremy. BTW, I deal with legacy machines that don't
> know from SSH. :-(
>
> Well this gets more interesting, at least to me...
> With LANG=UTF-8, man uses the Unicode HYPHEN character (U+2010)
> to break long words at the right margin, and uses the Unicode
> MINUS character (U+2212) to prefix command line options (e.g.,
> ls -l). The Windows Command Prompt window, used by Cygwin.bat,
> doesn't display U+2010 correctly with the Lucida Console font,
> but it works correctly with the default FixedSys font.

The FixedSys font is not a Unicode font, so what happens is that the
console display switches into codepage mode and automatically maps all
Unicode characters not in the font's codepage to some approximation of
them, where possible. For hyphen and minus that works well, but for
most characters it doesn't. You'll just get question marks instead.


> Mintty,
> OTOH, doesn't display U+2212 correctly with the default FixedSys
> font, but does with the Lucida Console font. So, if I can
> tolerate the ugly FixedSys font, then I can use Cygwin.bat and
> the Windows FTP and Telnet tools without (anticipated) problems.
>
> (I wonder if the Mintty developer would want to update Mintty to
> support U+2212.)

It is supported just fine. Mintty does have a special hack to map
U+2010 to plain '-', because most fixed-width Windows seem to be
missing that for some reason, but U+2212 is present in all the fonts
I've tried, except of course in non-Unicode fonts. For example,
Consolas, Courier New, and DejaVu Sans Mono all have it.

Bottom line: use a Unicode font for UTF-8.

Andy

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