pterm should default to a wide character font

[Peter Maydell]

Binary package hint: putty

By default, pterm doesn't seem to pick a font which supports wide characters (eg Japanese). As a test, start pterm,and type this:

zcat /usr/share/doc/groff-base/README.jp.gz | tcs -f jis | less

(assumes you have 'tcs' installed, also 'groff-base' and 'less', and that you have a UTF-8 locale).
pterm will display dots where all the wide characters should be.

For contrast, run uxterm (in the xterm package) and run the same command: all the wide characters should correctly display as Japanese characters.

This is happening because pterm doesn't default to the 'wide' version of the fixed font. You can force use of the wide font like this:
 pterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1'
(and if you run the test command under a pterm started like this you'll see that the characters are drawn correctly)

but I think that it would be better if this was made to Just Work by having the wide versions be the default.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Agreed, and I configure it this way myself. You don't happen to know if there's a programmatic way to take a non-wide font specification and get the matching wide one, do you?

[Peter Maydell (pmaydell)]

I'm not aware of any programmatic way to find a wide font, no. UXTerm/XTerm just lists them manually in its app-defaults.