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On Wed, 12 May 2004, Paulo Orvalho wrote:

> I do load a font for the pt_PT.map keymap at startup
> setfont lat4-16.psf...

Hurray!  It really helps to have people of different backgrounds in this
mail list.  I work as a translator, and when I load Russian the lines also
turn into A, or other extended ASCII characters (plus or minus) instead of
the line drawing characters in the default upper ASCII set.

In console mode, semigraphic symbols use to be part of the 8bit
character set. So you may get diacritical characters instead of lines
and frames if you need non-English fonts. There are at least two
workarounds:

1. Most languages do not really need 255 differenct characters, but
will be satisfied with a part of the 8bit set. So some fonts have
been written that maintain semigraphic symbols and implement the 8bit
characters only for a a certain language.

Example: Czech users of MC can load a reduced font (IIRC in console
and even in X) that displays all the frames correctly while giving
access to Czech characters, too. For Cyrillic this solution probably
will not be possible, because there are too many Russian characters,
covering almost the whole 128-255 range.

2. Mercyful software that allows to use 7bit semigraphical characters
instead of 8bit frames, lines etc.

Example: If you start mc with parameter -a frames and lines are
displayed only with -, +, and |.

Regards
Christof Lange

_______________________________________________

 Christof Lange <cce.zizkov AT volny.cz>
 Prokopova 4, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
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 http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov