• GoldEd and pseudo graphic symbols

    From Nil Alexandrov@1:16/101 to All on Sat Mar 16 21:46:06 2024
    Hello, All!

    With a great help from Vitaliy, taking it offline, I have solved my long-time issue with displaying pseudo graphic symbols in GoldEd. These *extended ASCII* characters could be anywhere, ranging from stat echoes with those nice graphs (MRTG style, if you know what I am taking about), or it could be that someone is using *Like* button to be displayed as a real button on your screen, or recently I have posted some QR-codes as a text.

    Vitaliy will likely provide us with some doc or FAQ, or update on both, on encoding in general. I can just sum-up here as just have your terminal+locale+golded settings in a good shape and you are good to go.

    Most software in UNIX/Linux world is locale aware, well except the *cat* utility which just copies binary data around. Most importantly, locale will provide you with the toupper()/tolower()functionality, which is actually broken for German, unless you are using something really sophisticated like ICU library. But for our exercise today, we will focus on isprint() and iscntrl() return which is locale dependent (sometimes I still say dependant as a Canadian, which is fuckeup version of UK English).

    In UNIX/Linux world, you spend most of your time in a terminal, except when you are using X-Window apps. Lucky you, if you login on a console, but that luxury ended up for me somewhat in mid-90x. Your terminal is highly likely has roots in DEC VT-100 back in 1978, though box-drawing characters are not so cool as in xterm or whatever $TERM variable you have nowadays in you *terminal emulation*. I am trying to pay your attention that the whole life here becomes in emulation since 70x.

    Best Regards, Nil
    --- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20240306
    * Origin: FidoNet member since 1995 (1:16/101)