Re: mined/mlterm ligature joining

[Thomas Wolff <mined at towo dot net>]

Hello Nadim,

> > My own mlterm installation on Solaris (which I compiled from the package) 
> > is very buggy overall. It does not apply right-to-left at all although
> > it was compiled with freebidi and freebidi is available.
> 
> Don't know what to tell ya - it works GREAT here.  Make sure to have
> fribidi in your path and to configure mlterm with '--enable-fribidi'.
> I also invoke mlterm with,
> 
>  $ mlterm -E utf8 --meta=esc 
I actually have to include -n -w 20 or it wouldn't find a suitable font.

> You might be having font problems - make sure to look into which fonts
> you are using on your suse vs. the solaris box.
The fonts are exactly the same.

> > Also I had told you that I don't see any combining character accents 
> > in my SuSE 8.1 mlterm, although at least the columns are accounted for
> > correctly there.
> > 
> > After all, I must conclude that mlterm is still a very buggy piece 
> > of software and that's certainly the cause of this problem.
> 
> It sounds to me like either a compile problem or a setup issue.  mlterm
> is solid and I'm (and have been) using it on a daily basis (as are many
> others).
Could you send me screenshot with combining accents?
And please send me a Solaris binary, maybe that resolves any 
misconfiguration.


> OK, I'm attaching two screenshots
>  1. with the older mined-2000.6 (from your website)
>  2. with the newer mined-2000.6 (you mailed)
> 
> NOTE: you might want to start naming those things as beta1, beta2, etc.
Right.
> Mind you the newer version reacts worse (the combining characters
> are no longer combined - both upon entry and upon display).

Oh, actually, I think to have found the problem. I see from your 
screenshot that mined does not assume the terminal has the 
combining character feature (the combining/separated mode flag just 
right to the Unicode "U" flag is missing).
I think I had actually suggested before that you not use the -U option 
but rather configure your environment appropriately to indicate UTF-8.
This is done by setting the environment variable LC_CTYPE to something 
that ends on ".UTF-8". Or if LC_ALL exists, that must end on ".UTF-8".
Then -U is not needed (and would actually have the reverse effect as it 
toggles; I have tweaked options to be able to tell mined for sure 
it has a UTF-8 and also combining terminal, but that's not available 
in the version you have).

So please try the following:
$ LC_CTYPE="whatever.UTF-8" mined -poX file


Also you should definitely set up your mlterm invocation so that 
LC_CTYPE is always set to something ending ".UTF-8" if mlterm is run 
in UTF-8 mode, for the sake of other applications as well.

My mlterm invocation script looks as follows:
#! /bin/sh
LC_CTYPE=`echo $LC_CTYPE | sed -e "s,\..*,,"`.UTF-8
 export LC_CTYPE
LESSCHARSET=utf-8	# used by less to select UTF-8 display
 export LESSCHARSET	# (less doesn't look at LC_CTYPE as it should)
MINED=o$MINED
 export MINED

exec mlterm -E utf8 -k esc -n -w 20 -b bisque1 $*


I'm looking forward to the results.

Best regards,
Thomas