The TinTin++ message board

dandenison84 · Joined: 30 Dec 2011 Posts: 39

When I log into my MUD, it shows a stylized building made of characters that make up a castle. When I connect from a normal windows telnet session, it looks fine. If I connect from tintin in ubuntu or cgywin, it just shows characters with things like umlauts and ascents.

I've tried #config charset UTF-8 and changing some of the fonts in my rxvt cygwin window to no avail.

What am I missing?

You can telnet to ourplace.fractured.org 6543 to see what I'm talking about if that helps.

sj · Joined: 22 Jan 2012 Posts: 16 Location: Manchester, England

Have you tried this?

Scandum · Site Admin Joined: 03 Dec 2004 Posts: 3281

It looks fine in the mintty terminal used by WinTin++.

I assume it's some kind of obscure terminal interaction causing this.

dandenison84 · Joined: 30 Dec 2011 Posts: 39

WinTin looks better, but I'm more concerned with tintin itself as that is what I use. When I open up a telnet session from Windows, it is using something called Raster Fonts which isn't available in the WinTin window, so that could be it as well.

dandenison84 · Joined: 30 Dec 2011 Posts: 39

Slysven · Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2012 12:24 pm Post subject:

The "Raster Fonts" actually maps out to the "Terminal" font in Windoze XP and you are limited to this (and Lucida Console) because they are special (monospaced) fonts with no decenders or other extremities that would project outside of the space allocated for that (fixed pitch) character into any of it's neighbours. Wikipedia suggests that this font is based upon the Microsoft CodePage 437 which does not sound like it plays well with the Unicode system of character coding but what follows may help...

If you have the Microsoft Character Mapper utility availible you can inspect the fonts that WINDOWS has availble but this is not the same as what the Cygwin subsystem can work with. For that xfontsel and xfd are your friends, the first can help you to identify a string of the form "-misc-liberation mono-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-m-*-ibm-cp437" which you can supply as an option to the "-fn" argument when invoking an Xterm so that it uses that particular font by default. This font name may match up to what you want. If (as is probably the case you can't find this font) read on...

To use this particular font which MAY be what you need: get the Liberation font which contains the Monospaced "LiberationMono-Regular.ttf" which has been GPL+ ed by RedHat from http://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/, and put it into both your Windows Font folder (so Windows can see it) and also your cygwin subsystem at {cygwin root directory}/usr/share/fonts/TTF . Update the XWindows system by going to that directory and running 'mkfontscale' and then 'mkfontdir' to update the font directory files "font.scale" and "font.dir" respectively, then run 'xset fp rehash' to update the Xserver's font server's idea about what fonts are availible to it.

dandenison84 · Joined: 30 Dec 2011 Posts: 39

Wow, most of that worked =) I'm still fiddling with but it is definately a font problem.

Slysven · Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2012 10:27 pm Post subject:

Ah, I've found a useful utility that can be built under cygwin that provides the Windows Charmap functionality in a cygwin enviroment: check out http://live.gnome.org/Gucharmap You will probably go through several ("./configure" -> FAIL due to missing dependency -> Use of Cygwin On-Line SETUP.EXE to get extra requirements; repeat) iterations before it'll build but it does compile [though not entirely cleanly I found]. When used it'll also reveal the multple character strings that you can use within TinTin++ (e.g. in a #SHOWME ) to call up a single UTF-8 glyph (e.g.

Slysven · Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2012 3:46 pm Post subject:

And another one 'xtermcontrol' source code available from its author at http://www.thrysoee.dk/xtermcontrol/ which works with xterm (the granddaddy of nearly all terminal emulators on *nix systems) that allows you to inspect AND change, on the fly, various parameters of an xterm from within. These parameters INCLUDE the font, fore and background colours, cursor color, mouse-cursor fore and background colours; also you can iconise, restore and maximise the terminal window from within. E.g. you can change the font to the above suggested one with the following within TinTin++: