Comment # 18 on bug 1118557 from Ulrich Windl

(In reply to Dr. Werner Fink from comment #17)
[...]
> the commands are for tcsh, but even with bash
> 
>   unset ${!LC_*}
>   LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 xdvi
> 
> it works. Maybe I should note that I've have always an encoding.dir as well
> as fonts.dir and fonts.scale below *all* subdirectories /usr/share/fonts/ as
> well as fonts.alias for the subdirectories of the x11 fonts packages.

It's really crazy: Using

unset ${!LC_*}
LANG=de_DE.UFT-8 xdvi file.dvi

works despite of the message "Warning: locale not supported by C library,
locale unchanged", too, but plain "xdvi file.dvi" does not (usual messages).
And to top all that: $LANG is "de_DE.UTF-8"!

Doing more tests, I found that "LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 xdvi ..." triggers the
problem when all other language variables are unset.

If I use "LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 xdvi ..." it does NOT work, but when I use
(illegal?) "LC_CTYPE=xx_XX.UTF-8 xdvi ..." it works!!!
What works too is "LC_CTYPE=de_DE.iso8859-1 xdvi ..."

Sorry, I cannot make any sense from all this!