fvwm truncates titlebar text at first non-ascii character
 

This is undoubtedly an fvwm question rather than a Linux question
(i.e., fvwm probably behaves the same way on non-Linux systems too),
but linuxquestions.org is a good place to find answers to non-Linux
questions.

Anyway, fvwm is truncating titlebar text at the first
non-Ascii character. It is not a matter of the WindowFont's
inability to display non-Ascii characters, because the xmessage
command demonstrates that it can; moreover, if the font were the
problem, the non-Ascii characters would perhaps be missing, or
perhaps replaced with the default bounding box, but the Ascii
characters following the non-Ascii characters would still appear
in the titlebar, and they do not: the first non-Ascii character
ends the titlebar string. And fvwm knows that the string ends
there, because it centers the string as if it ended there.

It is an old version of fvwm, but according to the old fvwm
release notes, this old version does support iso8859-1 characters:


$ fvwm2 --version
fvwm 2.5.25 compiled on Jun 7 2008 at 00:38:53
with support for: ReadLine, Stroke, XPM, PNG, Shape, XShm, SM, Bidi text, Xinerama, XRender, XCursor, XFT, NLS

fvwm comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. You may
redistribute copies of fvwm under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.



I find nothing in the fabulous manual that answers this question, so
now I turn to you. Thank you in advance for any and all replies.

jay at m5 dot chicago dot il dot us

+1 773 7613784 landline
+1 410 9964737 GoogleVoice

Seems you are on an old version of fvwm2, if possible you should upgrade to 2.6.5 (fvwm.org). There is also fvwm2 forums, but you will probably be asked to upgrade. The current version is fvwm2 is very stable.

Anyway can you define non-ascii ? As you can see from the attached print fvwm2 v2.6.5 works for me. My build:

fvwm 2.6.5 compiled on Aug 27 2012 at 11:01:00
with support for: ReadLine, XPM, PNG, SVG, Shape, XShm, SM, Xinerama, XRender, XCursor, XFT, NLS

John

It made no difference. I compiled fvwm 2.6.5 and installed it in /usr/local/bin :


$ /usr/local/bin/fvwm --version
fvwm 2.6.5 compiled on Apr 21 2013 at 22:19:29
with support for: ReadLine, Stroke, XPM, PNG, SVG, Shape, XShm, SM, Bidi text, Xinerama, XRender, XCursor, XFT, NLS

fvwm comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. You may
redistribute copies of fvwm under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.


and then replaced the old fvwm with it :


$ /usr/local/bin/fvwm -r &


I am still not getting iso-8859-1 characters in my titlebar. Thus, in an
xterm window:


$ echo -n '^[]0;hélène^G'


puts a centered "h" in the titlebar.

The behavior of FvwmPager is interesting. There is a small area in FvwmPager
that corresponds to this xterm window, and fvwm has drawn "hélène" into that
area. So the window manager definitely knows what the window title is supposed
to be. But when I move my mouse into that area, it pops up an "h" (black h,
yellow background -- the yellow background is no wider than than the black h,
so fvwm knows that the title string ends with the h).

I tried the echo and it works for me in xterm and rxvt on fvwm2 2.6.5, hélène shows up in the title bar. In my ~/.Xdefaults I have
so it must be the font you are using as opposed to fvwm2. I do not have an iso-8859-1 font on my system so I cannot check to see what it does.

John