For the part about the crashes, these can happen either when I start Urxvt or when I open a new tab both in the true color and non true color variant of the program. I’ve found that if I start Urxvt right after logging in to plasma it crashes every time. These started today and might be related to the latest distribution upgrade but I don’t know how.
I can’t find anyone online that seems to have this issue so I have no clue how to troubleshoot this.
Here is an image showing the issues with unicode characters, u2840 is supposed to be a braille character but it can not be displayed correctly.
Urxvt has been a bit on and off again about displaying these braille characters, sometimes displaying some but not all, and now not displaying any.
From what I have found online, issues like this is often due to either the font missing the required glyph or issues with your locale. In order to test this I have tried multiple fonts, including Hack which seems to be the default font of Konsole, which can display the braille. And I have messed around with locale a lot (but I don’t really understand locales so I have just followed online instructions).
My output for $ locale
$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=se_SV.UTF-8
LC_TIME=se_SV.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=se_SV.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=se_SV.UTF-8
LC_NAME=se_SV.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=se_SV.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=se_SV.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
I’ve tried setting it all to en_US.UTF-8 since that seems to have worked for others but it does not help, and it wouldn’t really be a satisfactory solution either since I want Swedish formats for a lot of stuff.
If there is anything I can provide to help troubleshooting, just give me instructions for how to provide it and I will be happy to.
Here, openSUSE Leap 15.5, not URxvt (do not even know what it is), but Konsole with bash:
henk@boven:~> echo -e "\u2840"
⡀
henk@boven:~>
That shown a few thoughts that are my opinion:
The locale has nothing to do with the output of characters (it has to do with formatting dates, money, numbers, translations of output, etc.). An UTF-8 character is an UTF-8 character. And it should be possible to show it on the screen and/or paper when there is a font definition that has the glyph. When no glyph available, a replacment should be shown (e.g. the inverted ? in a blacksquare on it’s point).
As you see in my konsole a BRAILLE PATTERN DOTS-7 is whown with a correct glyph.
Ahh my bad, I thought I had written in the OP that it did work in Konsole.
But yes, in Konsole and other programs the braille characters work like they should. That’s why I tried the font Hack, which is what Konsole uses.
I looked at all the fonts I’ve tried with an online font viewer to see if they have the braille glyphs. None do, even Hack which Konsole uses. So that means that the issue is that URxvt for some reason isn’t finding the fallback font that actually has those glyphs anymore.
So now I just need to find a font that actually has them to manually set and see if that works. Any recommendations?
Alright, I have been testing every monospace font I could find on my system to see if one had the braille glyphs. I found a “Efont Fixed” that does and when I add it as a secondary font in URxvt it can now display the braille dot properly.
It’s not the best match for Monaco but it works for now. I wonder why URxvt wasn’t able to find a font for the glyph on it’s own, from what I can tell it should have that functionality.
I did the only reasonable thing and made my own braille font based on the Monaco font.
I have no clue what my legal rights are to it, otherwise I would like to distribute it somehow.
