[SlugLUG] unicode text in terminals

[Suraj N. Kurapati]

Erich Blume wrote:
> Secondly, what is a good console font to use that not only supports UTF-8,
> but actually employs a lot of it? I mean, not just sygils and accents, but a
> LOT of stuff such as, er, Japanese (I can never keep the names of the
> different character sets straight), and Arabic (same deal). I never use
> these, of course, but I'd like to at least have the *option*.

I use the default "monospace" font with gnome-terminal in Ubuntu and
the Unicode languages automagically appear (thanks to Pango or
FontConfig or ...?) when necessary.

AFAIK gnome-terminal uses Pango without support for more complex
languages (Indian scripts, Thai, etc.) for speed reasons. Apart from
these, the CJK and European languages are rendered correctly in
their full glory.

Mozilla does this too (using Pango halfheartedly) to provide a more
responsive experience for non-Indic and non-Thai users (why slow
down the browser by processing fonts for languages you'll never read
anyway?). However, unlike gnome-terminal, Mozilla provides a
mechanism (MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO environment variable) by which we can
enable the full use of pango and thereby read our scripts correctly
on the Web.

If you need to work with Indian scripts, like I do, then you're
stuck with adapting to the broken rendering in gnome-terminal or
using a GTK+2 file manager (rox, nautilus, firefox, etc.) to have
the languages rendered correctly.