5

I tried to install Mapscii on a raspberry pi, but for some reason the list of character that it is able to display seems limited. I've Jessie light installation, no GUI, but the strange thing is that i've tried to connect different display to the pi, and i always got squares character instead of the unknow ones (mainly braille characters), except that it properly display the everything trough a ssh connection.

Does someone can help me?

Thanks

Dmitry Grigoryev
  • 27,928
  • 6
  • 53
  • 144
piLeoni
  • 51
  • 1
  • 3

2 Answers2

2

MAPscii homepage tells you in the first sentence than it needs an xterm-compatible terminal. Braille characters are unicode (they really should've called it MAPunicode and not MAPscii), and the default font management system (fontconfig) is part of X. There are alternatives (google tinyfont, ft2tf and fbpad) but by far the easiest solution would be to install xterm (which will pull the whole X GUI system) or fbterm (which will pull fontconfig and all its dependencies). You can also configure your virtual console to use unicode using /etc/sysconfig/console or unicode_start, but you still need to install unicode fonts for this to have the desired effect.

You probably run your SSH client in either Windows (putty) on in X environment (inside xterm), that's why MAPscii works via SSH.

Dmitry Grigoryev
  • 27,928
  • 6
  • 53
  • 144
  • first of all thanks. Anyway i tried fbterm but with little success, documentation is really quite technical for a beginner. Initially i was only getting: stdin isn't a interactive tty! (from ssh) Then i tried: fbterm <> /dev/tty1 Learning in the while about stdin, stdout and ttys. But it was anyway quite messy, with two cursors, and unable to stream that or other node based app on it, or to set it as default. If you have some advise that would be my first choice. – piLeoni Sep 12 '18 at 11:15
  • About /etc/sysconfig/console or unicode_start, are those something requiring fbterm as well or a just setting the standard linux console being able to visualize those glyps? – piLeoni Sep 12 '18 at 11:15
  • @piLeoni I think you have asked a follow-up question which got migrated here. I answered that, though I only found it years later. – Dmitry Grigoryev Sep 08 '21 at 09:20
  • Note that fbterm can run an arbitrary program inside it without the need to hijack /dev/tty1. You could just run fbterm mapscii or something along the lines. – Dmitry Grigoryev Sep 08 '21 at 09:31
0

To get the braille characters, install the console-braille console font:

sudo apt install console-braille

I recommend to do the next step over SSH, to undo changes if the console stops working. Edit the file /etc/default/console-setup to look like this:

# CONFIGURATION FILE FOR SETUPCON

Consult the console-setup(5) manual page.


ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"


CHARMAP="UTF-8"


CODESET="guess"
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE="8x16"


VIDEOMODE=


The following is an example how to use a braille font


#FONT='lat9w-08.psf.gz brl-8x8.psf'
FONT='Lat15-Terminus16.psf.gz brl-16x8.psf'

Back on the console, load the new font settings:

setupcon

If the console now looks funny, revert your changes over SSH and use setupcon again. Check that your chosen fonts are present in /usr/share/consolefonts/.

This still won't give you the full unicode range of characters, but at least you'll have both regular Latin and braille characters now. Which should be fine for MapSCII (and other tools which want to display graphs with braille characters).

Klaws
  • 101
  • 1