Bug 443029

Summary: Indic languages {kn,hi,pa}_IN.utf-8 messes display, app is hardly usable
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Reporter: Michal Nowak <mnowak>
Component: slangAssignee: Miroslav Lichvar <mlichvar>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: BaseOS QE <qe-baseos-auto>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 5.2CC: ohudlick
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
URL: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=228240#c30
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2010-04-13 16:35:26 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Flags
Result of running newt based app in Indic locale none

Description Michal Nowak 2008-04-18 09:17:34 UTC 
Description of problem:

Running rhn_register --nox this way LANG=kn_IN.utf-8 rhn_register --nox the
display is totally messed up.

See attached screenshot.

According to $(URL), the problem might be the newt package, snack module.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
newt-0.52.2-10.el5.i386

How reproducible:
always

Expected results:
clear display like in en_US.utf-8 etc

Additional info:

Hitting Ctrl+L helps a bit, resizing of the newt based app in Konsole (or any
generic term emulator)  window seems to be completely broken -- try to shrink
and then enlarge the window.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=302340
Comment 1 Michal Nowak 2008-04-18 09:17:34 UTC 
Created attachment 302857 [details]
Result of running newt based app in Indic locale
Comment 2 Michal Nowak 2008-04-18 09:20:19 UTC 
It'd be very helpful to hear your opinion in bug 228240.
Comment 3 Miroslav Lichvar 2008-04-18 13:07:26 UTC 
This looks like a slang bug.

Please note that probably no terminal emulator packaged in RHEL5 is able to
display Indic scripts properly. Even with this bug fixed there will be some
corruption left.
Comment 4 Miroslav Lichvar 2010-04-13 16:35:26 UTC 
We could update the UTF8 tables in slang that are used to determine width of characters to match the tables in glibc, but that wouldn't solve the problem.

It seems that Indic scripts are very hard (if not impossible) to display correctly in full screen terminal applications. Both slang and terminal emulator would have to have a special Indic support and would have to agree on how many columns a word takes.

I'm closing this as WONTFIX.