Tkinter and utf-8

[Dirk Thierbach]

Justin Ezequiel <jezequiel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Among others, I am missing characters in the range 
>        017F     383    LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S 
> to 
>        036F     879    COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER X 

> my xlsfonts numbers: 
> 448     539   24261 

The numbers don't help a lot, but you can use xlsfonts to get better
information. Unicode encoding is 'iso10646-1', so do

xlsfonts -fn '*iso10646*' 

to see what unicode fonts you have in the first place. Adding -lll
will list metrics for each character, so do (for example)

xlsfonts -lll -fn '*iso10646*' | grep 0x17f

to see all the metrics for LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S. If any of these
have non-zero metrics, the character is available. Inspect the full
output to find the complete font name, and use 'xfd' to display the
font. On my system, for example, all *misc* fonts have this character,
but the *helvetica* fonts don't.

Finally, you have to make sure Tk uses the fonts. IIRC Tkinter allows
you to access the Tk option database, so set the font options
with X-style names. That should do the trick, but I didn't check.

> I'll get some help here re obtaining fonts. 
> Thank you. 

I use Debian, not Mandrake, but you should be able to download Mandrake 
packages for fonts somewhere, if necessary. Make sure there is no version
clash with the X server you are using.

- Dirk