In accordance with directives - possibly misunderstood - I have reconfigured the Debian "locales" package; I changed the installed locale from en_US.ISO-8859-1 to en_US.UTF-8 and left the default locale for the system as "none".

So far so good.

In my ".bashrc" file, I have an entry for "LC_LANG".

If this entry is set to "en_US.ISO-8859-1" all my texts are readable on the console but I get warnings like:
Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
Using the fallback 'C' locale

If I change the LC_LANG entry to "en_US.UTF-8", I no longer get these warnings but the screen-display of Midnight Commander (mc) is a real mess. And even man-pages are no longer able to display hyphens (-) correctly.

What have I missed?

felixk

Make sure you set LANG variable to en_US.utf-8 and possibly LC_ALL and make sure you have the right fonts installed and used. After you do this and logout, login check the output of locale command...

Usually when I got this messege I use dpkg-reconfigure locales and then I select the one(ones) I am going to use.

I tried all of these (and dpkg-reconfigure locales) before posting the query.

The hard facts are:

1. Midnight Commander (which I like and use routinely) does not support utf-8 and turns into a mess when loaded in a utf-8 environment;

2. vim - in a utf-8 environment - offers many hundreds of additional digraphs; but the few digraphs, that I occasionally need (for French or German words), have become difficult to find.

and

3. After the change to the utf-8 locale, my man pages are littered with unreadable characters.

Given that utf locales are likely to become the default option, I posted the initial query to forestall future headaches. For the present, I can live with complaints that are posted to the console, but cannot live with an unusable Midnight Commander and messed-up man-pages.

I will be grateful for any other advice that will help me to prepare for an unwelcome future.

felixk