Ubuntu
nano package

On the console block characters are shown instead of pretty quotes

Bug #1569964 reported by Removed by request
12
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
nano (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 dev with nano 2.5.3-2 and on going to the console and setting LANG to de_DE.UTF-8 I'm noticing that changing an existing file with nano and aborting the changes with CTRL + X does show before and after the word "Nein" a black square instead of the characters „ and “ as they are shown on a terminal.

Revision history for this message
Benno Schulenberg (bennoschulenberg) wrote :

Hm. Did earlier version of nano (for example, 2.2.6 on Lucid) not show these black squares around Nein? Because those pretty double quotes have been there in the German translation of nano since at least 2009. If not, did you maybe change the font that is used on the console? Or maybe Ubuntu changed the default font there?

Benno Schulenberg (bennoschulenberg)
Changed in nano (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Benno Schulenberg (bennoschulenberg) wrote :

Confirmed on an up-to-date Manjaro install, so it is not just an Ubuntu thing. And it's not just nano either, because when I do (in a Dutch locale) for example 'stty cols' (without giving a number), I get an error message that has those two block characters around cols. (On a console, that is. On a terminal emulator it works fine.)

On a console, the accented letters of French, German, and Spanish seem okay. But when I specify Croat as the language... Try running 'LANGUAGE=hr nano', and then type ^G. You'll see twenty, thirty, forty of these block characters. Apparently the console font leaves something to be desired.

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Removed by request (removed3425744) wrote :

I have also seen this issue in the past with GRUB and reported it too: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1558926
I was not sure if I should have appended nano to this report or create a new one as at the GRUB issue for some special reason a character has been choosen that would not be required.

Revision history for this message
Benno Schulenberg (bennoschulenberg) wrote :

I think this bug should instead be filed against the console, against the font it uses, not against each individual package that uses pretty quotes. Really, a modern font should be able to render “” and ‘’ and «» correctly, also on the console (VT).

summary: - Malformed characters on the console with LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 are shown
+ On the console block characters are shown instead of pretty quotes
Revision history for this message
Benno Schulenberg (bennoschulenberg) wrote :

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/console-setup/+bug/657551/comments/23 .

The recipe more explicitly:

sudo cp /usr/share/consolefonts/Uni2-Fixed16.psf.gz /etc/console-setup/
sudo gunzip etc/console-setup/Uni2-Fixed16.psf.gz
sudo sed -i 's:^CODESET=.*:CODESET="Uni2":' /etc/default/console-setup

And this comment gives, I think, a hint at the proper solution:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/debian-installer/+bug/609775/comments/4 --
that is: the installer should figure out which consolefont to install.

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