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silverhammermba

Wiki Maintainer

Registered: 2011-04-14

Posts: 156

Some unicode characters not displaying in xterm

While some unicode characters display just fine in xterm, others do not. For example, I have this text in a file:

☠⠉⠛⠿⣿

That's a skull and crossbones followed by four braille characters.

If I open that file in gVim, it looks correct. But if I cat the file in xterm I see

☠□□□□

the braille has been replaced with white squares. The same happens if I open the file in Vim in xterm.

I also tried downloading this test page:http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richard/unicode-sample-3-2.html
Again, it looks (mostly) fine in gVim, but in xterm most of the characters are white squares. But unicode isn't entirely broken because I can see a few sections such as Armenian, Greek, Arabic, and IPA in the xterm output.

Here are my settings:

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

$ locale -a
C
en_US.utf8
POSIX

$ cat .Xresources 
! colors
XTerm.termName: xterm-256color
XTerm.vt100.background: black
XTerm.vt100.foreground: white

! unicode fonts
XTerm.vt100.locale: true
XTerm.vt100.utf8: true
XTerm.vt100.renderFont: true
XTerm.vt100.faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono
XTerm.vt100.faceSize: 10

Just in case it was a font issue, I also tried changing both xterm and gVim to Terminus. But the issue was the same: I see all unicode characters in gVim, mostly white squares in xterm.

Everything works fine in urxvt, but I would prefer to stay with xterm if possible.

Edit:

If I remove all the font/utf8 stuff from .Xresources (so xterm uses the default font) it actually works as well. It's only when I set faceName that certain unicode characters stop displaying. But that seems odd because Deja Vu Sans Mono is the same font I use in gVim and there it works fine.

It looks like I'm getting exactly the same problem as this thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=168195. Still no solution.

Last edited by silverhammermba (2016-02-26 03:18:56)