Greek Accent Problem

[Zsbán Ambrus]

2010/6/26 Kevin Monceaux <Kevin at rawfeddogs.net>:
> It's displaying some accented Greek characters, such as the ones in this
> sample:
>
> δόματος ἀνθρωπίνου προεστᾶσιν ὥσπερ ἔνιοι.
>
> as boxes.  The same text displays correctly in gnome-terminal, with the same
> font, Terminus.

Terminus has most of the greek letters from the range 0x384-0x3ce (I'm
not saying they're looking good, but they're certainly not boxes),
such as ά, but it does not have any of the extended precombined
accented characters from the range 0x1f00-0x1ff0, such as ἔ, and some
of the latter appear in your sample.

As a fix, try installing a font that has these and is monospaced and
is of the right width and height such that urxvt can use it, and
specify it either as a primary font or as an alternate font in the
urxvt options.  Maybe gnome-terminal is already substituting some font
more aggressively.  Is your urxvt compiled to use xft fonts, not only
x fonts?

Ambrus