Description of problem: In "Character Coding" menu there is, among others, an option for KOI-8 encoding. In an attempt to see what it is doing I added it to possible choices and try to 'cat' to a screen a small test file in this encoding. It does something as my screen was covered with a bunch of squares while doing the same with a default UTF-8 is producing a lot of question marks. I am afraid that such subtle differences really elude me. There is no trace of a problem why trying to display the same file, using appropriate fonts - of course, using Red Hat 7.3 system. See also an old bug report #68651.
squares would typically indicate that your font doesn't have glyphs for the file. Can you attach your test file?
Actually I used the same file which was attached to #68651. I did not bother to repeat pictures attached to that older report as they did not basically change. But this particular text file is short so why not once again.
Created attachment 89060 [details] a test file in KOI-8 encoding
Created attachment 89064 [details] test file in UTF-8 If I convert the test file to UTF-8, the terminal still fails to display it. But if you cut-and-paste what the terminal displays to gedit, or open the UTF-8 file in gedit, it displays correctly. Conclusion I think is that the character coding stuff works properly (we correctly convert to UTF-8) but the terminal does not find the right font glyphs for the UTF-8.
Owen says the problem is that gnome-terminal does not do fontsetting as gedit etc. do, as a deliberate decision. So you have to choose a font that actually has these characters. Indeed if I choose "Andale Mono" (a Microsoft font we don't ship) then I can view this file. "Nimbus Mono" also seems to work, as does "Fixed"
I could follow that logic if there would be a way for a user to find out if a given font has at least a chance to have required glyphs or not. Since you took that out (in older versions I was able to pick up a desired encoding and this had a pretty good chances that corresponding glyphs will be also present) then IMO this "deliberate decision" is really a serious conceptual and design bug. Am I supposed to play a font lottery? You have to be kidding. BTW - I tried to configure terminal fonts to "lucidatypewriter" which in 7.3 distribution has a variant with koi-8 encoding and cyrylic glyphs. Actually a cyryllic text picture attached to bug #68651 is done with this font. Now no dice. Does that mean that fonts got broken too or that gnome-terminal is too limited to look into the right places? "fixed" most likely provides the example of the worst screen font (mis)designed ever. Sigh!
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I do not think that this old stuff is applicable any longer.