[screen-devel] Re: Multibyte characters in the Hardstatus line

[Zvi Har'El]

This is already an old thread, that I started in February, and got 
Alexander Kriegisch's response in March and Michael Schroeder's response
in April. The question was about displaying UTF-8 characters in the
window title when it is used as the screen hard status line (see full
post below).  I am still not satisfied with the situation. Since xterm
has a special vt100 widget resource named *utf8Title*, which is
described as follows:

>  utf8Title (class Utf8Title)
>                Applications can  set  xterm's  title  by  writing  a 
> control
>                sequence.   Normally  this  control sequence follows
> the VT220
>                convention, which encodes the string in ISO-8859-1 and 
> allows
>                for  an  8-bit  string  terminator.   If xterm is
> started in a
>                UTF-8 locale, it translates the ISO-8859-1 string to
> UTF-8  to
>                work with the X libraries which assume the string is UTF-8.
>
>                However,  some  users may wish to write a title string
> encoded
>                in UTF-8.  Set  this  resource  to  ``true''  to 
> allow  UTF-8
>                encoded title strings.  That cancels the translation to
> UTF-8,
>                allowing UTF-8 strings to be displayed as is.
>
>                The default is ``false.''
>
I am using this to display UTF-8 titles in xterm (e.g., my current
directory, which is encoded in UTF-8). We might have a similar option in
screen, which sends the characters to the  X libraries with no
translation, so that  it is displayed correctly.

II am not wrong, this should not be a major change.


On 23/04/07 21:28, Michael Schroeder wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 12:04:09PM +0200, Zvi Har'El wrote:
>   
>> Comparing Unicode, it replaces U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA with 
>> U+00B1 PLUS-MINUS SIGN and so on, i.e, the Unicode  values seem to be
>> taken modulo U+0100.
>>     
>
> Yes, it's because StringChar() in ansi.c discards the upper bits.
> To fix this bug we'd have to change the way the string gets stored.
> Note that we can't just simply transcode to the display's encoding,
> as the window may be displayed on multiple displays with different
> encodings...
>
> Cheers,
>   Michael.
>
>   
Here is my original posting:

> Hi,
>
> I am using Screen in a en_US.UTF-8 locale, inside an xterm. I am using
> the xterm standard escape sequence to set the window title.  I have a
> the following problem: There is no problem with the Basic Latin
> (ASCII) characters (Unicode <  0+007F), but also with Latin1
> Supplement characters (U+0080 <= Unicode < U+00FF), are displayed OK.
> However, other characters are displayed incorrectly: for example, the
> command
>
>
> echo '\e]0;αβγ\a\c'
>
>
> in a normal Xterm shows the title
>
>
> αβγ
>
>
> but in screen version 4.00.03jw4 (FAU) 2-May-06 (from the CVS) show
> the title
>
>
> ±²³
>
>
> Comparing Unicode, it replaces U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA with 
> U+00B1 PLUS-MINUS SIGN and so on, i.e, the Unicode  values seem to be
> taken modulo U+0100.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Zvi.

-- 
Dr. Zvi Har'El      mailto:address@hidden    Department of Mathematics
tel:+972-54-4227607                  Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
fax:+972-4-8293388  http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~rl/    Haifa 32000, ISRAEL
"If you can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all." -- Thumper (1942)

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