How to properly display characters in Ubuntu

Question

I am connecting to my ubuntu 16.04.2 server virtual machine through Putty.

When I open the this file in terminal, I get empty rectangles where icons should be.

Actual icons and as displayed in terminal:

How do I display the icons in the terminal?

Answer 1

Using PuTTY, there are two things to check (in PuTTY's settings dialog):

• ensure that the Remote character set (in the Window/Translation section) is set to UTF-8
• select a font which has the given characters (in Window/Appearance ). In a quick check, the default Courier New does not , while Lucida Console does — partly.

Once I made those changes, the file displayed properly for some of the special characters (CALENDAR and MUSIC). The others did not. They use these codes: U+25C0, U+231A and U+2388

If I used the Consolas font, that shows a backward question mark for those codes (a slight improvement).

If you don't mind using proportional fonts, Tahoma has the first of those codes. Lucida Sans Unicode fares no better.

If you have Microsoft Office installed, it adds fonts which can help a lot. I recall that its Arial has pretty good coverage. But the bundled version of Arial which I see on the Windows machine at hand is not so good.

That still leaves the last two (CLOCK and CPUIMG). You might find a suitable font, but offhand, the only ones with good coverage cost a little more. Not free. (A corollary to this is that most of the ones offered for some cost don't have good coverage).