Printing UTF-8 characters

[Conrad Meyer]

You've said a number of things about UTF-8 that appear to be mistaken.
Start here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 7:42 AM, Farhan Khan <khanzf at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 2:28 AM, Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de> wrote:
>>
>> El día jueves, febrero 01, 2018 a las 01:15:34a. m. -0500, Farhan Khan escribió:
>>
>> > Hi everyone,
>> >
>> > Is there a standard way to render historically non-printable UTF-8
>> > characters that will work across all terminals? I am trying to modify a
>> > standard FreeBSD utility that may occasionally work with characters in
>> > other languages. On some terminals, specifically FreeBSD running in
>> > VirtualBox, I see question-marks rather than the expected character. I
>> > wonder if this is the proper way to display such non-printable characters
>> > or no?
>>
>> Not sure what you mean with 'historically non-printable UTF-8'. UTF-8 is
>> an encoding form (one of more) to present Unicode Codepoints in bytes. If
>> you want to "print" them to paper or PDF there are ways to write them
>> with Postscript and with the correct font-support to bring them into
>> human readable form. If you want to "display" these UTF-8 bytes you need
>> a terminal-software with UTF-8 support, for example from the ports x11/rxvt-unicode
>> and the fonts for the Codepoint areas you want to display.
>>
>> Btw: Can you display my signature line correctly? There is an UTF-8 encoded
>> Codepoint for a mobile telephone :-)
>>
>>         matthias
>> --
>> Matthias Apitz, ✉ guru at unixarea.de, ⌂ http://www.unixarea.de/  📱 +49-176-38902045
>> Public GnuPG key: http://www.unixarea.de/key.pub
>>
>
> Sorry, that was a poorly phrased question on my part. Let me try again.
> I am trying to make text align in columns in a terminal. My
> understanding is that characters above 0x7E are 3 bytes in length. A
> modern terminal will render that as either a single question-mark or
> the character itself, making terminal column alignment easy. But how
> would an older terminal display a 3-byte character? I am worried that
> would render as 3 question marks and throw off column alignment. If
> so, is there a proper way to perform alignment for both newer and
> older terminals?
>
> I am reading this email on Gmail's, so those characters properly
> render for me :)
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Farhan Khan
> PGP Fingerprint: B28D 2726 E2BC A97E 3854 5ABE 9A9F 00BC D525 16EE
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org mailing list
> https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"