Re: Openinig text files with international characters in nautilus

[José Alburquerque <jaalburquerque cox net>]

José Alburquerque wrote:
> Joao Palhoto Matos wrote:
>   
> > A piece of advice:
> >
> > Do printenv in a terminal and let people know if
> >
> > GDM_LANG
> >
> > is set and to what value.
> >
> > This depends on your choice in the gdm login screen for language.
> >
> > Hopefully your trouble is just a choice of the C locale for language 
> > (or most likely you never chose one) or  never installed appropriate 
> > locale support.
> >
> > I cannot reproduce your problem. I have
> > GDM_LANG=pt_PT.ISO-8859-1
> >
> > but I am an ultra conservative about using ISO-8859-1 which makes life 
> > with pine, latex and php simpler.
> >
> > Duplicating a file in nautilus I got a filename with "cópia" which Vi 
> > improved happily opened.
> >
> > On the face of it your problem is totally unrelated to gnome.
> >
> >     
> It seems that you are right about me never choosing a gdm locale (I 
> don't recall ever having done this since my fresh install of my debian 
> system).   When I do a 'printenv | grep -i gdm' I get:
>
> jose sweety:~$ printenv | grep -i gdm
> GDM_XSERVER_LOCATION=local
> GDMSESSION=default
>
> so I don't have a GDM_LANG variable defined.  Do you think that if this 
> variable is set at login (say to "C") it would fix my problem?  TIA.
>
>   
I don't exactly know the specifics of what is going on, but I was able 
to solve this problem.  What I did first was to select a default 
language, English (USA) - American English (en_US.UTF-8), from the gdm 
login screen, which causes the GDM_LANG variable to be defined (along 
with a LANG variable):

jose sweety:~$ printenv | grep LANG
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
GDM_LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Secondly (and this may be the most inexplicable in my solution), I added 
the actual command 'gvim -f' to the "Open With" tab of the "Properties" 
window of the text (*.txt) files in the directory that I'm working in.  
When I right click on the files and "Open With gvim", everything works 
perfectly fine.

I can see the name of the file fine in nautilus, when I 'ls' in a 
terminal, the name appears fine also.  And finally, the file opens fine 
in vim without any problems with parsing the filename (the filename 
appears fine at bottom of vi).

Can't say why this fixes my problem, but when I look at my 
/usr/share/applications/gvim.desktop file, the "Exec" field has "gvim -f 
%U".  I can only guess that there is an issue on my system with the "%U" 
part but don't know what it could be.  For now I'm satisfied that I can 
open the text files with one click. :-)  Thanks for suggestions!

--
Sincerely
Jose Alburquerque