Since successfully Japanesizing my SuSE 8.2 personal system (thank you, all!), I've noticed a new problem. Suppose I go to the box in which I've typed "phantom characters" (the title of this message), move the cursor to the front, and delete the initial "p" (perhaps because I want to change it to "P"). The other 18 characters -- including the space, and sorry if I've miscounted -- would be expected to move slightly to the left: hantom characters That's what would have happened last week. But now, it wouldn't happen; instead I'd see: hantom characterss Indeed, if I left my finger on the Del key, I'd read racterssssssssssss etc. Now, my growing-fast-but-still-minuscule knowledge of Linux tells me that Del and Backspace don't work in (say) bash as they might on the MS-DOS command line to which I'm accustomed. Fair enough. But why should the addition of Japanese make this change to Mozilla? More widely, text input works fine in some places -- e.g. the message box of Mozilla; I have no trouble revising what I am writing *here* -- and not others, where the text-input vertical-line cursor seems not to be placed quite correctly. If this is a known bug somewhere, tell me and I'll learn to live with it. I'm asking because I suspect that it's a well known fact that XXX should be set to YYY whereas my XXX is probably set to ZZZ; and I'm asking here because (a) the change does seem to be Japanesification-related, and (b) you're such nice people :-)
Peter Evans <peter@despammed.com> さんは書きました:
Suppose I go to the box in which I've typed "phantom characters" (the title of this message), move the cursor to the front, and delete the initial "p" (perhaps because I want to change it to "P"). The other 18 characters -- including the space, and sorry if I've miscounted -- would be expected to move slightly to the left:
hantom characters
That's what would have happened last week. But now, it wouldn't happen; instead I'd see:
hantom characterss
Indeed, if I left my finger on the Del key, I'd read
racterssssssssssss
etc.
Now, my growing-fast-but-still-minuscule knowledge of Linux tells me that Del and Backspace don't work in (say) bash as they might on the MS-DOS command line to which I'm accustomed. Fair enough. But why should the addition of Japanese make this change to Mozilla?
I've never seen that in Mozilla and couldn't reproduce it now either. Where exactly does that happen? In the URL entry widget? Is it reproducible? Can you give detailed instructions how to reproduce it? -- Mike Fabian <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。
Mike Fabian asks:
I've never seen that in Mozilla and couldn't reproduce it now either. Where exactly does that happen? In the URL entry widget?
No, in the Subject box of Mozilla mail. The URL entry thingie of the browser component is fine.
Is it reproducible? Can you give detailed instructions how to reproduce it?
I'm afraid that you're going to have to use (or at least be about to use) Mozilla mail. Type something in the "Subject:" box. Move the cursor to the start of the resulting line of text. Hit delete a few times. You'll get a kind of mess where the characters were at the end of the string, so what was World domination and should now be ld domination is now ld dominationnnn or similar (the phantom characters at the end are sometimes clear, sometimes not). Now move the cursor outside this line (e.g. to the message area) and the mess may or may not disappear. Could this perhaps be font-related? No, probably not -- I'm not aware of ever having consciously chosen a font to use in that part of Mozilla, but anyway it's a sans-serif monospaced font, very unlike the serif monospaced font in which I'm now typing this. The former seems to be the same font that's used for the menus of Mozilla mail and the Mozilla browser ("Go" "Bookmarks", "Tools", etc.), and for the URL window of the Mozilla browser. Ah, it's probably just some Mozilla buglet. I'll learn to live with it for the short term. (In the medium term I think I'll change mail client, for other reasons. But I have to learn some other aspects of Linux, not to mention attend to Linux-unrelated concerns, before I get around to that.)
Peter Evans <peter@despammed.com> さんは書きました:
I'm afraid that you're going to have to use (or at least be about to use) Mozilla mail.
Type something in the "Subject:" box. Move the cursor to the start of the resulting line of text. Hit delete a few times. You'll get a kind of mess where the characters were at the end of the string, so what was
World domination
and should now be
ld domination
is now
ld dominationnnn
I can't reproduce that with the mozilla 1.2.1 from in SuSE 8.2. When I tried the above, it behaved correctly.
or similar (the phantom characters at the end are sometimes clear, sometimes not). Now move the cursor outside this line (e.g. to the message area) and the mess may or may not disappear.
Could this perhaps be font-related?
I think it could be font related. I remember I had such problems with the old Netscape 4.x with certain font settings, although I didn't yet see such effects with Mozilla.
No, probably not -- I'm not aware of ever having consciously chosen a font to use in that part of Mozilla, but anyway it's a sans-serif monospaced font, very unlike the serif monospaced font in which I'm now typing this. The former seems to be the same font that's used for the menus of Mozilla mail and the Mozilla browser ("Go" "Bookmarks", "Tools", etc.), and for the URL window of the Mozilla browser.
The font used for the menus in Mozilla cannot (as far as I know) be setup via the preferences dialog, the only way I know to change the font for the menus of Mozilla is to create a ~/.gtkrc file and define a fontset in there. For example like this: mfabian@magellan:~$ cat .gtkrc style "gtk-default" { fontset = "-efont-biwidth-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-p-120-iso10646-1,-*-*-medium-r-normal--24-*-*-*-c-*-*-*" # fontset = "-efont-biwidth-medium-r-normal--16-160-75-75-p-80-iso10646-1,-*-*-medium-r-normal--16-*-*-*-c-*-*-*" } class "GtkWidget" style "gtk-default" mfabian@magellan:~$ This example uses fonts from efont-unicode.rpm, you need to have this package installed if you want to use this example exactly as is. And 24 pixel is of course really huge and only makes sense if you have at least 1600x1200 pixels on your monitor, otherwise try the 16 pixel version. Does this have any influence on the behaviour in your case? I tried different font settings for the menus (which does also influence the "Subject:" box in Mozilla mail) but I could not find any setting which gave the effect you observe. It didn't occur with the default settings (when I delete my ~/.gtkrc) either. Anyway, the font handling in this part of Mozilla is due to change very soon, Mozilla in the next version of SuSE Linux will likely use Gtk2 which uses fonts via libXft2/fontconfig which can be setup in ~/.gtkrc-2.0. -- Mike Fabian <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。
Here's another example. I've just written a message for whose subject line I wanted to quote something from a web page. I found the phrase "a few kilobytes of RAM and no disk at all" (no quotation marks) -- http://www.dunkels.com/adam/contiki/apps/webbrowser-text.html (Linux-irrelevant, but recommended!) -- and copied it to the clipboard via Ctrl-C. Moving to the subject box for a new message in Mozilla, I first typed a quotation mark, then hit Ctrl-V -- and found the cursor not at the end of the block as expected, but in the middle of "at". I hit another quotation mark; this didn't appear anywhere (either to close ". . . at all", where it should have appeared, or in the middle). I moved the cursor to the right (without clicking it), and the second quotation mark magically appeared in the right place. I've just done this a second time; exactly the same thing happened.
The "phantom character" effect doesn't occur with Konqueror or in the URL window of Mozilla (1.3.1), but it does occur in, say, the search field of Google in Mozilla. As I type a string in the search field, the cursor gradually lags behind what I type. This if, in Google-in-Mozilla, I type konqueror I see the cursor immediately after the final "r"; if konqueror disable the cursor is in the middle of the final "e"; if konqueror disable flash the cursor is immediately after the final "s" and the final "h" appears like an "l". Hitting Alt-Tab twice renders the "h" legible. Perhaps I should add that all of this is in KDE. (Gnome sounds interesting, but I haven't yet ventured into it.)
Peter Evans <peter@despammed.com> さんは書きました:
The "phantom character" effect doesn't occur with Konqueror or in the URL window of Mozilla (1.3.1), but it does occur in, say, the search field of Google in Mozilla. As I type a string in the search field, the cursor gradually lags behind what I type. This if, in Google-in-Mozilla, I type konqueror I see the cursor immediately after the final "r"; if konqueror disable the cursor is in the middle of the final "e"; if konqueror disable flash the cursor is immediately after the final "s" and the final "h" appears like an "l". Hitting Alt-Tab twice renders the "h" legible.
I couldn't reproduce that either. Typing and editing in the search field of Mozilla works fine for me.
Perhaps I should add that all of this is in KDE. (Gnome sounds interesting, but I haven't yet ventured into it.)
For the problem discussed here, it does not matter here whether you run Mozilla under KDE, Gnome, or any other desktop or window manager. -- Mike Fabian <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。
Thanks for the attempts at solving this problem. I think it may be related to another, whereby characters aren't displayed at all in some fonts. My totally uneducated guess is that the SuSE Linux Administration Guide assumes ISO 8859-1 or similar and is now being displayed in Japanese, non-existent characters being squashed. Anyway, I read for example (near the start of "YaST in text mode (ncurses)"):
Basically, the entire program can be controlled with , + , space, the arrow keys (and ), , and shortcuts.
Ah well, I managed to do what I needed to do, even without explanations. I have a number of SuSE-related questions that, because they're M17N-irrelevant, don't belong here. Meanwhile, the ML of the local LUG greets them with stony silence. While the idea of Suse-Linux-e looks good, and questions posted there do seem to get answers, and I too am interested in the battle for World Domination, I don't want to subscribe to a ML and thereby get a bazillion messages about "Microsoft Vs. Linux Desktop Battle Heats Up" etc., etc. Clearly suse.com can't reorganize its mailing lists just for my benefit, but if there is any discussion of splitting Suse-Linux-e into practical issues on the one hand and political (etc.) ones on the other (or of converting it into a BBS), I'm all for it.
participants (2)
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Mike FABIAN -
Peter Evans