Czech language input method and font support in gvim 7.4 on Windows 7

fontsgvimunicodewindows 7

I would like to reopen a question related to the following:

(Czech) character set support in gvim 7.3 on Windows 7

Basically, in that post I noticed that some Czech characters
were being displayed as black squares. So I posted the question
and noticed that the problem seemed to go away by changing the
font. I thought that solved the problem because the characters
in the file I was using displayed correctly.

However, I have noticed the following: while some Czech characters
display correctly by changing the font from the Gvim menu, others
do not display correctly:

For instance when I paste the character Ů (Latin capital letter u with ring above)
or ů (Latin small letter u with ring above), no font displays the resulting character
correctly. For instance, the Fixedsys font displays a black square and a small u,
respectively, while Lucida Console displays a capital U and a small U, respectively.
I have tried all fonts available from the gvim drop-down menu, and none seem to work
for this particular case.

The problem does not end here. The input method for unicode characters
produces the wrong characters:

CTRL-V u0160 should produce the Czech character (Š) but the backquote (') is inserted instead.
CTRL-V u016e should produce the Czech character (Ů) but the n character (n) is inserted instead.
And the list goes on.

As if that were not enough, there is a list of alternative input method key combinations
at the following site (which is a list of digraphs):
http://code.google.com/p/vim/source/browse/runtime/doc/digraph.txt

but despite having the latest verion of gvim, when I type ":digraphs", this list does
not show up. Only the old list from gvim 7.3 shows up, which does not include these.

For instance CTRL-K U0 and CTRL-K u0 both produce the character zero instead of the following:

Ů U0 016E 0366 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH RING ABOVE

ů u0 016F 0367 LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH RING ABOVE

To summarize, despite gvim 7.4 being recently released, none of the distributed
fonts are compatible with the Czech language, inserting unicode via CTRL-V
seems to produce the wrong characters, and digraph support is incomplete.

Thank you for your answers.

Best Answer

Problem is that coding Latin-2 (iso-8859-2) and Windows-1250 (used by windows) differ in some characters:

ž, š, ť, Ž, Š, Ť

All differences are summarized at Wikipedia or Czech version

If you set encoding=cp1250, then it'll be ok.

I don't want to prolong comments so I'm adding that here.

There is a problem that standard code page uses only 1byte (hex 100) for characters, so there are ISO standards for different languages. If you have set encoding iso-8859-2 and trying to add unicode character (hex 160) Š, than gvim loops over to character (hex 60). You have to use codes ISO-8859-2, where Š ìs (hex 089). Other codes here: http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-2

UTF-8 on the other hand uses 2bytes and contains simultaineously all? letters and signs. So if you use set encoding=utf-8 and then add U0160 or U5927 you'll get Š resp. 大.

Fixedsys contains ů and Ů, OR there is a difference in font versions between Windows language mutations (I use Czech version), but I doubt that. You can use windows utility Charmap.exe, there you can select desired font and check which characters it supports, even their unicode code.

I was trying briefly some of default fonts in GVim and there seems to be some that supports Chinese (ie MS Mincho), but I don't which signs are important.

GVim seems to be supporting only monospace character fonts so, if you'll be searching for another font be aware of that. :)

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