Troubleshooting on Linux

I can’t see any fancy symbols, what’s wrong?

  • Make sure that you’ve configured gvim or your terminal emulator to use a patched font.

  • You need to set your LANG and LC_* environment variables to a UTF-8 locale (e.g. LANG=en_US.utf8). Consult your Linux distro’s documentation for information about setting these variables correctly.

  • Make sure that vim is compiled with the --with-features=big flag.

  • If you’re using rxvt-unicode make sure that it’s compiled with the --enable-unicode3 flag.

  • If you’re using xterm make sure you have told it to work with unicode. You may need -u8 command-line argument, uxterm shell wrapper that is usually shipped with xterm for this or xterm*utf8 property set to 1 or 2 in ~/.Xresources (applied with xrdb). Note that in case uxterm is used configuration is done via uxterm*… properties and not xterm*….

    In any case the only absolute requirement is launching xterm with UTF-8 locale.

  • If you are using bitmap font make sure that /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf does not exist. If it does check out your distribution documentation to find a proper way to remove it (so that it won’t reappear after update). E.g. in Gentoo this is:

    eselect fontconfig disable 70-no-bitmaps.conf
    

    (currently this only removes the symlink from /etc/fonts/conf.d). Also check out that no other fontconfig file does not have rejectfont tag that tells fontconfig to disable bitmap fonts (they are referenced as not scalable).

The fancy symbols look a bit blurry or “off”!

  • Make sure that you have patched all variants of your font (i.e. both the regular and the bold font files).