Unicode text doesn't appear correctly in shell

Question

I'm using the terminal in Kali Linux and I try to type Arabic text the characters are shown but separated (appearance not correct)

This what my shell shows me ex. لا ا ل ه ا لا ا ل ل ه, which should be لا اله الا الله

can the shell support Unicode text

the output of command ps $$ $PPID; locale

 PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
 3777 ?        Sl     0:15 gnome-terminal
 6092 pts/1    Ss     0:00 bash
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

it seems it is utf-8 ok

can i change the font used for shell output to another font? and where the fonts located?

Answer 1

Id don't know much about gnome-terminal, but if you're going to work with non-latin scripts, you may want to look at rxvt-unicode. It handles almost every script correctly (provided you have the fonts, and the output really is UTF-8).

$ sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode
$ urxvt

As a bonus, you'll get a great piece of documentation about terminals reachable by man 7 urxvt which is also nice place to look for troubleshooting information.

Note that in default configuration Rxvt looks quite unappealing (it tries to be nice to xterm users :)) so search Internet or mentioned FAQ for how to make it look better.

Other task is selecting the right font. For Urxvt, it's font resource. For experimenting, you can specify the font name on command line, e.g. `urxvt -fn "xft:Dejavu Serif". Refer to urxvt documentation for this.

If you want to look for fonts, I'd start by searching in your repository. For example aptitude search arabic or apt-cache search arabic does this in Debian.

Answer 2

Terminal fonts

In a terminal you have to use so called monospaces fonts, (where a lower caps i use same width than a upper case w):

(Thats monospaced fonts:

iiiiiiii
WWWWWWWW

Thats normal fonts:

iiiiiiii

WWWWWWWW

)

This is because all tables and output formating is done by character positionning.

So maybe your ouput could be prompted by using a dialog tool:

mytext='لا اله ال'
gdialog --infobox "$mytext" 60 2

Answer 3

Use setxkbmap:

setxkbmap -layout ara -variant basic

If you want, add this line to your ~/.xinitrc file to run it every boot.