UTF-8 and FVWM [solved]

[Dominique]

I am a little bit confused with UTF-8 and FVWM. From the man page, it is 2 way to tell fvwm which encoding to use: XLFD (X Logical Font Description) and Xft.

I can read into the man page:

Once a font is loaded, fvwm finds its encoding (or charset) using its name (the last two fields of the name). fvwm assumes that the strings which are displayed with this font use this encoding (an exception is that if an iso10646-1 font is loaded, then UTF-8 is assumed for string encoding). In a normal situation, (i) a font is loaded by giving a font name without specifying the encoding, (ii) the encoding of the loaded font is the locale encoding, and then (iii) the strings in the fvwm configuration files should use the locale encoding as well as the window and icon name. With Xft the situation is bit different as Xft supports only iso10646-1 and iso8859-1. If you do not specify one of these encodings in the Xft font name, then fvwm does strings conversion using (iii). Note that with multibyte fonts (and in particular with “CJK” fonts) for good text rendering, the locale encoding should be the charset of the font.

To override the previous rules, it is possible to specify the string encoding in the beginning of a font description as follow:

StringEncoding=enc:full_font_name

where enc is an encoding supported by fvwm (usually font name charset plus some unicode encodings: UTF-8, USC-2, USC-4 and UTF-16).

And later:

Another possibility is to use UTF-8 encoding for your FvwmForm configuration and use an iso10646-1 font:

“StringEncoding=UTF-8:xft:Bitstream Cyberbit”

or equivalently

“xft:Bitstream Cyberbit:encoding=iso10646-1”

Are the 2 font declarations in the last quote equivalent or not? The first quote say no, the second one say yes.

I also don’t understand how the locale encoding and the charset of the font are related in the case of an UTF-8 system. Have fr_CH.UTF-8 and ja_JP.UTF-8 not the same encoding?

My basic problem is that I don’t get japanese characteres into the titlebar of my windows. I try to shift to the same font as the one used by urxvt. It work wine in urxvt, I can see that the titlebar is using the same font, but get only squares instead of the jap characters.

For my windows titlebar:

Style * Font "StringEncoding=UTF-8:xft:Verdana:pixelsize=20:Bold"

I also try without StringEncoding and with and without “encoding=iso10646-1”.

~/.Xresources:

URxvt.font: xft:Monospace:pixelsize=20

[Dominique]

Well, this is mad. I just try to change the font for the titlebar to “Bitstream Cyberbit” and it work. The jap characters are finally here.

Can someone explain me how a font that work into my console will not work into fvwm when another font will work?

[Dominique]

And I forget to say that I am using fvwm-crystal, sorry!

[thomasadam]

@Dominique

Can someone explain me how a font that work into my console will not work into fvwm when another font will work?

Sure – they’re completely and utterly different. A font which you can use in the console has nothing to do with how FVWM might use it.

– Thomas Adam