### Mined Unicode Howto

#### Environment setup and Usage of mined for Unicode text

#### UTF-8 encoded Unicode support and features

- See the mined features page for an overview of mined support for Unicode editing.
- For general information on Unicode and its support on computers, see also Markus Kuhn's UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux.

  #### Environment setup

  Install suitable terminal
    Mined is a text mode editor. Its UTF-8 support is available for example with the newer versions of xterm (>= 145 recommended), rxvt-unicode, mlterm, kde konsole, or on the Linux console, each in UTF-8 mode.
    - If you don't have a recent version of xterm on your system, compile one yourself; configure xterm with the option "--enable-wide-chars" or use the script `configure-xterm` from the mined runtime support library. Then invoke "make".

  Install suitable fonts
    Install Unicode fonts for your X server.
    - To check if your X installation already provides Unicode fonts, you may invoke the command `xlsfonts | grep iso10646`. If this doesn't list anything, or if you cannot find a suitable font setup, do one of the following:
    - Automatic installation:
    The Mined runtime support library contains a script "installfonts" that downloads these fonts and installs them with your X server. It finally gives some hints how to add them to your permanent font configuration.
    - Manual installation:
    - Retrieve some of the following fonts:
      1. UCS fonts for X with their CJK supplement from Markus Kuhn's page Unicode fonts and tools for X11
      2. Adobe and B&H bitmap fonts from the same site which contain fixed width Courier and Lucida Typewriter fonts
      3. Unicode VGA font from Dmitry Bolkhovityanov's site
      4. Monospace Roman BDF fonts and their Oblique / Bold / Bold Oblique supplements from George Williams Unicode fonts page
    - The nicest looking font in the UCS fonts archive mentioned above is the 10x20 size font, it is suitable for higher screen resolutions. Unfortunately, the CJK double-width fonts are not distributed in the corresponding 20x20 size, but only in the 18x18 size. The corresponding single-width font in 9x18 size, however, looks quite spindly and for my taste rather awkward.
      For this reason, I am providing a script to generate 20x20 CJK fonts automatically from the 18x18 UCS fonts distributed for X servers. It is `bdf18to20` and you find it in the mined runtime support library. Go into the directory where you unpacked the fonts and invoke the script.
    - Install the fonts with your X server: unpack them into a directory (e.g. `$HOME/xfonts`), go into that directory, invoke the `mkfontdir` command. Then make sure that the fonts are loaded into your X server, using the command `xset +fp $HOME/xfonts`; a suitable place to include this automatically would be your `$HOME/.xinitrc` X initialisation file if you have one.
        Note: If you are working in a network, make sure the xset command is invoked such that the X server has access to the given directory on the machine it is running on.
        Some X servers (e.g. Exceed on Windows) do not accept BDF fonts; use the "Compile Fonts" function of the configuration menu to install the fonts.

Start terminal in UTF-8 mode
  Invoke a terminal window in UTF-8 mode and configure it to use fonts sufficient to display the text you want to edit.
  - Invoke xterm with suitable resource configuration or command line parameters. I recommend to invoke xterm with the Unicode script `uterm` from the mined runtime support library.
    Since mined 2000.8, UTF-8 mode is auto-detected. So it will work even if your locale environment is not configured correctly.
      Note: xterm is quite touchy about configuring suitable matching fonts for single-width and double-width glyphs. If you are unlucky, CJK character display will result in garbage on the screen. My recommendation is to generate the 20x20 UCS fonts with my `bdf18to20` script as mentioned above and configure xterm to use 10x20 - it will then automatically select one of the 20x20 fonts for double-width characters; if you have a preference among them, use the -fw command line option or the wideFont X resource (in your `$HOME/.Xdefaults` file). See the pattern file `Xdefaults.mined` in the mined runtime support library for suggestions of suitable entries. (Double-width font matching works much better with rxvt which even seems to scale double-width fonts in an acceptable way if needed.)
  - If you prefer rxvt, use rxvt-unicode and make sure to indicate using UTF-8 by setting a locale in your environment that is installed on your system.
      Note: rxvt is quite touchy about configuring a known locale setting; it does not have a strict UTF-8 option that would reliably work on all systems.
  - Hint: For hints how to configure the environment explicitly so that rxvt, konsole and other applications work with UTF-8, see the mined manual page (about LC_CTYPE and other environment variables). Accurate locale setting is not needed by xterm and mined.
    For other terminals (e.g. mlterm), see their manual for how to configure UTF-8 mode.
  - Alternatively, you can start mined directly together with its own terminal window. For this purpose, the mined runtime support library contains the script `umined`; this also quickly enables you to use the most recent version of Unicode width data (specifying wide and combining characters) as built-in to xterm in contrast to system-provided locale data which may refer to an older version of Unicode.
On a Windows system, you can also use the script `wmined` or `wmined.bat` which will invoke mined in an rxvt terminal window. `wmined` starts rxvt with Windows look-and-feel colour settings and tries to match your font size preferences by inspecting the Windows registry. The advantage of using rxvt on Windows is that it can run stand-alone, without an X server. The disadvantage is that rxvt-unicode does not run on Windows yet.

  #### Handling Unicode text with mined

  Screen handling
    Usually, mined will auto-detect a UTF-8 terminal and also the detailed features it has (like double-width and combining characters, Arabic ligature joining, different width data sets).

  Character encoding
    By default, mined detects automatically if the text in an edited file is UTF-8 encoded (Unicode character set) or not (either 8 bit encoded or CJK encoded); it also detects and maintains UTF-16.
    Mined handles illegal UTF-8 sequences transparently so if you accidentally open an 8 bit or CJK encoded file in UTF-8 mode, or a file with mixed parts, you can edit the text without problems and will not loose any information. Non-UTF-8 codes are indicated by display background highlighting.
    While editing, you can switch the character encoding assumed for text interpretation with the encoding menu (left-click to toggle current and previous encoding, right-click to open menu).

  Unicode display on non-Unicode terminal
    If a UTF-8 file is edited in a Latin-1 terminal environment, characters outside of the Latin-1 range (greater than 0xFF) are displayed as a block symbol `¤` with special indications for wide and combining characters. The Euro symbol is displayed as `E`. Please consult the manual page, section Unicode display for details.

  Combining characters
    Mined supports display and editing of combined characters consisting of a base character and one or more combining characters.
    It provides two display mode, a combined display mode which displays the combined characters as they should appear, and a separated display mode which separates base character and combining characters for explicit handling. These modes can be selected and are indicated in the Combining display flag: `ç`: combined mode, ```: separated mode.
    See the manual page, section Combining characters for details.

  Bidirectional display
    Mined auto-detects if it is run in a terminal that supports bidi scripts (e.g. mlterm), or it can be told so with the command line parameter `+UU`. The mined runtime support library contains a script `mterm` to invoke mlterm with suitable parameters to set up bidi mode and a suitable font.

  CJK and 8 bit character set support on Unicode terminal
    Mined also handles major CJK encodings in a UTF-8 terminal, as well as a selected set of mapped 8 bit character sets. See the mined features page, or the manual page, sections CJK support and Character encoding support for details.

Mined homepage and download.
Thomas Wolff