Complete charset
 

apt-get install <what> would make it to where I have the full set of characters on a Debian etch machine?

I'm annoyed because I make use of the full character sets of languages I don't even speak for various artistic and RPG related purposes. I also like to set my KDE language to eo sometimes and I'm getting annoyed by the missing characters. I've gotten them before, but am not really sure how I did it (that install died when bad things happened to my harddrive).

I don't think there is any way to get a "full" character set with one package. Your best bet is to install a variety of different font packages in various languages. I know that there are some decent unicode fonts that have a wide range of character support. Try an "apt-cache search font" or such to dig them up.

I actually thought of that. I've got everyting, except the TTF versions of certain languages. And that only because I've got the Xfont variants installed already. It seems, to my memory, that those wouldn't be important because I recall not having installed them before (though I could be mistaken, hence having installed virtually every font package in aptitude). As it stands I can, in Charmap with KDE select a font that does not contain a-circumflex and it simply displays a standard font there instead of it looking like the rest of the characters in that font, but I have a lot of things missing, like esperanto characters, the Cherokee alphabet and random arabic letters, and whole blocks of mathematics symbols that I know I used to have. To say nothing of the more interesting stuff.

I found the solution to my problem... or more accurately recalled what it is. xfonts-<dpi>dpi-transcoded. also various other xfonts-<whatevers>. They're what determine the baseline characters support... sort of the GUI console text. Anyhow, the problem isn't what I don't ahve installed, it's what didn't install properly. My missing esperanto characters for example, are part of xfonts-75dpi-transcoded, xfonts-base-transcoded and xfonts-100dpi-transcoded... and the problem is that select characters are either corrupted or missing. I need only reinstall them.

So anyone else having this problem: Check that you have the correct xfont package installed. If you do (highly likely if you were careful at initial install), then just reinstall those packages. If that fails find somewhere where those fonts are kept as a tarball and just copy them to /usr/share/fonts yourself.