Package: libncursesw5 Version: 5.4-8 Severity: normal I've just finished converting aptitude's display routines to understand about >8-bit character set locales such as utf8. Everything works fine in typical European locales -- however, when I tried setting the locale to zh_CN, I noticed some display artifacts. After a bit of experimentation, I believe that I've found the general situation that's causing this problem. As you probably know, Chinese characters are "wide" -- by which I mean that they take two columns on the text terminal. The problem I'm encountering occurs when a wide character is *partially* overlapped by a non-wide character. For instance, you can see this when a popup menu appears on top of a background of wide-character text:
http://people.debian.org/~dburrows/aptitude-utf8-screenshot.png I know that the terminal (xterm) is capable of displaying what I want, because when I moved the cursor around a bit, it displayed everything properly: http://people.debian.org/~dburrows/aptitude-utf8-screenshot2.png In fact, ncurses' behavior in the presence of partially overlapped characters seems very unpredictable. It randomly will either: (a) do what you see above: shift the overlapping characters to the right to fall on a character boundary (in some cases it even seems to shift stuff to the left!); (b) erase the overlapped character completely and draw the overlapping characters where they were placed, or (c) draw the overlapping character on the bottom and the overlapped character on top, as in the second example. As far as I'm concerned, either (b) or (c) would be OK, although of course (c) is preferable. (a) pretty much makes it impossible to generate reasonable output via curses in the presence of text that might overlap. Daniel -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.11-1-686 Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Versions of packages libncursesw5 depends on: ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an Versions of packages libncursesw5 recommends: ii libgpmg1 1.19.6-20 General Purpose Mouse - shared lib -- no debconf information -- /------------------ Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ------------------\ | We are Debian of Borg. | | You will be packaged. | | Resistance is futile. | \------------ Evil Overlord, Inc: http://www.eviloverlord.com --------------/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
