khal shows a question mark after calendar entries

[andreas-bulling]

Hi,

for some reason, khal is showing a question mark after most of the calendar events although (if I look at these events in MacOS's calendar application) I did not add any. I also noticed that German Umlaute (non-ascii) are not shown properly in khal although utf-8 otherwise works fine in the same console (iterm2) and the Umlaute are shown properly in MacOS's Calendar. Maybe related?

[geier]

The font you are using is probably missing some symbols used by khal. Those question marks should probably by arrow-circles. You can replace them by ascii symbols with setting `[locale] unicode_symbols = False` in the configuration file. Quoting andreas-bulling (2017-05-02 15:15:48)

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Hi, for some reason, khal is showing a question mark after most of the calendar events although (if I look at these events in MacOS's calendar application) I did not add any. I also noticed that German Umlaute (non-ascii) are not shown properly in khal although utf-8 otherwise works fine in the same console (iterm2) and the Umlaute are shown properly in MacOS's Calendar. Maybe related? -- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #640

[andreas-bulling]

Thanks a lot for your quick reply. With this option it now shows a "R" behind these entries...

Which font are we supposed to use that fully supports the symbols used by khal? As I said, otherwise I don't have any problem with UTF-8 support in my terminal...

[geier]

The R or circle is supposed to indicate that this is a repeating event, the circle symbol is U+27F3 'CLOCKWISE GAPPED CIRLE'. I expected it to be one of the more common non-ascii symbols, but to my surprise I just realized it isn't the font I'm using either, so it must be some kind of fallback font, perhaps Symbola (http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/). We really should add this to the FAQ. Quoting andreas-bulling (2017-05-02 15:34:19)

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Thanks a lot for your quick reply. With this option it now shows a "R" behind these entries... Which font are we supposed to use that fully supports the symbols used by khal? As I said, otherwise I don't have any problem with UTF-8 support in my terminal... -- You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #640 (comment)

[andreas-bulling]

ok... Well, what about simply showing the "R" in brackets behind the title (i.e. "$title (R)") instead of this fancy (and apparently difficult to properly support) symbol?

[WhyNotHugo]

Which font are we supposed to use that fully supports the symbols used by khal? As I said, otherwise I don't have any problem with UTF-8 support in my terminal.

What's the output of `echo ⟳' (you can retype this on gtk apps with ctrl+shift+u27f3)? It seems you do have problems, since this is plain utf-8.

[geier]

I'm open to replacing R by (R) for the no-fancy symbols setting, but I'm actually quite fond of the unicode symbols.

[andreas-bulling]

@hobarrera I am on MacOSX/iterm. If you let me know what I have to type there I am happy to test. As I said before, I didn't notice any problems with UTF-8 so far in any other software.

[WhyNotHugo]

Can you copy-paste the above character? I've no idea about macOS/OS X/iterm.

You're saying you've no issues with Unicode, but this bug report seems tonne about your terminal not properly supporting Unicode on some level.

[andreas-bulling]

I copied and pasted and it shows properly in my terminal

[WhyNotHugo]

Huh, that's odd/curious. What's the output of each of these commands:

python -c "print('⟳')"
python -c "print('\u27f3')"
printf "⟳\n"

[andreas-bulling]

The first and third return the desired symbol, the second returns \u27f3. (Python 2.7.13, system default).

With python 3.6.1 all three return the desired symbol, i.e. seems to be a Python (version) problem.

[geier]

The way we wall this in python is this python -c "print('\N{Clockwise gapped circle arrow}')", please try that as well.

Also, which version of khal and python are you using?

[andreas-bulling]

python 2.7.13: \N{Clockwise gapped circle arrow}
python 3.6.1: the desired symbol

khal: 0.9.5

[antifob]

Hi,

I find the unicode's cool, but, when disabled, the "R" can easily be confused with
the summary. I second the change for a spaced version or, better IMHO, a "(R)"
version as, in my case, it is really a font issue and I like mine too much to use another.

khal's pretty nice, btw :)

[WhyNotHugo]

What confuses me is that no-one has managed to reproduce the problem by simply running print on python3 (even though they see the problem in khal), so it's unclear if it's a python problem or a khal one.

For those who see the issue, can you make sure you're not somehow running khal with python2 (python2 is unsupported, and setup.py shouldn't let you install it with python2, but just in case).

[antifob]

Well, in my case issuing python3 -c "print('\N{Clockwise gapped circle arrow}')" prints an empty box since it is not implemented. I use Inconsolata. Also, khal is definitely running with python3 on my side.

[WhyNotHugo]

@uqam-fob So, it sound to me like the font is missing the glyphs, and there's no fallback font configured? Maybe your terminal supports having a fallback font (eg: like urxvt, termite).

[antifob]

@hobarrera You are correct, there is no fallback font.

Just to make sure that the focus is on the right thing, I added unicode_symbols = False in my configuration and I, too, think the "R", for recursive events, could be separated from the summary to increase readability.

[antifob]

Well, I just re-read my comment in the context of the issue and created #657.

As for the issue at hand, I would consider it is installation- or font-related. I can't think of any sane way to protect against the latter. For the first, maybe @andreas-bulling can tell how he managed to install/use khal with python2.

[andreas-bulling]

@uqam-fob I simply installed it using homebrew

brew info khal khal: stable 0.9.5 (bottled), HEAD CLI calendar application. https://lostpackets.de/khal/ /usr/local/Cellar/khal/0.9.5 (1,473 files, 10.4MB) * Poured from bottle on 2017-04-29 at 13:22:18 From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/khal.rb ==> Requirements Build: git ✔ Required: python3 ✔

[andreas-bulling]

I just checked /usr/local/Cellar/khal/0.9.5/bin/khal:
The first line reads #!/usr/local/Cellar/khal/0.9.5/libexec/bin/python3.6, i.e. khal does seem to be run with python3 as it should be. Still the symbol is not shown properly.

[WhyNotHugo]

@andreas-bulling Can you confirm that that is the khal being used running which khal.

[andreas-bulling]

same binary:

$ which khal
/usr/local/bin/khal
$ ls -la /usr/local/bin/khal
lrwxr-xr-x  1 user  admin  29 29 Apr 13:22 /usr/local/bin/khal -> ../Cellar/khal/0.9.5/bin/khal

[geier]

Is there a way to contact the homebrew maintainer of khal? Perhaps they have an idea of what's going on. Or, as a last resort, open an issue at homebrew? I'm already put off by their strange nomenclature though, and this doesn't seem to list a maintainer.

[geier]

possibly related urwid bug: urwid/urwid#286

[geier]

As I now have frequent access to a Mac I can confirm that this is indeed a case of urwid/urwid#286.

[geier]

As discussed in urwid/urwid#286, this is an issue of wrongly set locale. E.g. setting the locale to LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 fixes the issue.