[mythtv-users] Unicode characters showing up as question marks

Dave M G martin at autotelic.com
Tue Jan 16 22:45:57 UTC 2007


Jack,

> I think the OSD font is
> specified explicitly in Frontend Settings. So you might have some luck
> tweaking the frontend Settings to use a Unicode font that contains
> Japanese characters.

Thanks for this. I'm so close now I can almost taste it. I went here:
Utilities/Setup->Setup->TV Settings->Playback->On Screen display->OSD font

And found that I was able to switch between two fonts, freesans.ttf and 
on other. Freesans displays *some* of the Japanese correctly, but 
clearly it's not a full on Japanese font. (For those familiar with 
Japanese, Freesans displays the hiragana characters, but not the kanji).

What I need to be able to do is add to the list of available fonts for 
that menu option.

Does anyone know where I might be able to do that?

>
> Are you sure? "Collation" normally refers only to the way a database
> decides whether one character precedes another - for purposes of sorting
> and comparison. It shouldn't be directly related to how data is encoded.
>   

I'm a lowly web designer and by no means a databasing exrt, so I can't 
expand on the reasons behind the necessicty of setting collations to be 
the desired encoding. I can only go by experience in buidling web sites 
that use PHP/MySQL that this has always proven to be a necessary step in 
ensuring that text data moving in and out of the database be stored and 
reproduced correctly.

Other options that should be set for proper utf8 functionality:
Edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf, locate the section that starts [mysqld], and add 
these lines under it:
# utf8
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci
skip-character-set-client-handshake

Also, if I remember correctly, there are a few MySQL system variables 
that should be set to utf8.

Basically, so far as I've ever experienced, every single step of a 
process involving encodings has to be in agreement, or the text can turn 
into garbage (or question marks, or little boxes).

> That might be a default for the MySQL product itself.
It definitely is the default for MySQL to use latin1_swedish_ci. Lord 
knows why, but there it is.

But, whoever is making the MySQL database that drives MythTV would be 
well advised to make sure, when setting up the database, to ensure all 
text fields and text related settings are saved as utf8, in order to 
ensure true utf8 functionality.

Yeechang Lee wrote:
>
> What I forgot to ask in my previous reply is, how does one do the
> above? I know nothing about SQL syntax beyond what was required to set
> up MythTV.
>   
You have to be somewhat familiar with MySQL to do these kinds of 
settings, or at least a front end like phpMyAdmin. If you don't know 
enough about MySQL to know where to look for these settings, the topic 
is a little too big to explain here. But if you do know how to access 
phpMyAdmin, then it's a simple matter of viewing the table and editing 
the table structure to change the collation encoding.





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