PuTTY wish unicode-mappings

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summary: Compatibility mappings for Unicode characters unsupported by a font
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.

It's well known that Red Hat 8 boxes start up in UTF-8 by default, and hence that PuTTY must be set into UTF-8 mode or else commands such as man(1) will Do The Wrong Thing.

I (SGT) have just had a chance to actually play with PuTTY connecting to a RH8 box, and discovered that even with UTF-8 enabled, you don't always get the right results. man(1) handles hyphen/minus characters inconsistently: in some situations it produces U+2212 MINUS SIGN, but in others it produces U+2010 HYPHEN. ("man rm" is a good way to show up both types.) Many Windows fonts (Lucida Console, Courier New) support the former but not the latter, so that even in UTF-8 mode there are nasty "unknown character" rectangles appearing in the man page.

I think a neat solution to this would be to have a list of compatibility character translations, mapping a single Unicode code point to a different single Unicode code point, so that U+2010 could be displayed as U+2212 (or even U+002D!). This feature would also be useful for displaying U+0060 and U+0027 as U+2018 and U+2019, to ease the conflict between TeX-era Unix users who quote `like this' and pedantic fonts in which those quotes utterly fail to match).

Points to consider:

Audit trail for this wish.


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(last revision of this bug record was at 2006-06-22 23:33:07 +0100)