I'm in the process of porting a SCO Unix C program over to SuSE Linux. It is a text based program which I am currently executing in a bash shell through the KDE Konsole program. (on SCO it runs from the ksh command line).

The program is written in C which I compiled with gcc.

The program uses extended ASCII characters to draw line graphics (ie. ASCII decimal value 179 draws a vertical line).

This works fine on DOS and SCO. But on Linux the line graphics get translated into box characters. Our quick fix is to change the characters to standard ASCII (ie. using a pipe (|) symbol for a vertical line). This gives us line graphics in our program, but looks like garbage.

I also wrote out a little program to output the ascii table, and it looks like every character from 128 and above is not defined.

I've read that ncurses could be used for this purpose. Would ncurses give me the characters I need both in KDE and from a non KDE (console) login.

And yeah.. In case you haven't guessed already, I'm a linux newbie. I've got a couple weeks worth of SuSE under my belt.

Thanks,
Bob

The problem comes from the font that displays your chars, for example if the
char 179 is not built in the font, there is no chance that you could display it.

Also the encoding is important, from man iso_8859-1 :
As you can see, if you use iso_8859-1 encoding, the char with dec value 179
will print a ' ³ '

I see in the iso 8859-1 man page what you mention (the character being Subscript three). Given that, is there an encoding that has any of the old "extended ascii" (for lack of a better term) line characters?

Using a console login, and running my little program that outputs the ascii table, All charactes 128 and above appear blank.

I haven't played with the character set any on this linux implemtation. Should I be changing a setting to get the right character set?

Thanks

try setting LC_CTYPE to iso_8859_1; that should iso-enable your console.

for emacs, add
to ~/.emacs

My recommendation would be to not rely on the dos extensions, and use iso-8859-1 (or plain ascii) with curses instead -- curses is ported to dos.

hth --Jonas