KDE Plasma Konsole umlaut weirdness

[n2o]

Hi all,

after a few years of happily using Cinnamon I switched my main working machine and laptop to KDE yesterday and really love how everything is so well integrated and polished here. Now I just noticed a (small) problem though: umlauts are not correctly displayed everywhere.

In Dolphin and on a text tty (Ctl-Alt-F2) all is good. In Kate’s title umlauts are correctly displayed too. In Konsole and e.g. in LibreOffice’s title bar and recent document overview, however, I get gibberish and LibreOffice can’t load the documents from there (“file doesn’t exist”).

Konsole:

$ touch täst
$ ls
't'$'\303\244''st'

I read a lot here in the forum and elsewhere and tried a few things but no success. /etc/locale-gen is all cool and locale seems to reflect the settings in “System Settings → Region & Language”.

I’m on a current stable Manjaro KDE using English GB as main language and either English (GB), English (Germany) or German (Germany) for the other settings. I always have to stay in English as a language because I have no idea what my machine wants when it speaks German to me - thus the mix. But I did play around here with different settings, logging out and back in each time.

It’s probably a tiny thing I seem to be missing but quite a few threads in different places around the net with similar topics end without a solution. But I can’t really believe it can’t be fixed. Anybody have some mental floss handy? Thanks in advance!

Update: I found out that opening documents in LibreOffice via Dolphin works fine and umlauts are displayed correctly in the title bar and also for newly opened documents in the history. Seems like the non working umlaut documents were from the backup and the old Cinnamon system. Leaves the Konsole problem.

[Mirdarthos]

Hi @n2o,

Try installing the hunspell German dictionary from the extra repositorry:

$ pamac search hunspell
[...]
hunspell-de  20161207-8                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 extra
German hunspell dictionaries
[...]

Install it with:

pamac install hunspell-de

Hope it helps!

[n2o]

Thanks @Mirdarthos, but unfortunately no change.

[Mirdarthos]

I’m presuming you did, at least, log in and back in again?

If so, I’ve got nothing else, sorry!

[n2o]

I did, even rebooted. So you do think too that a solution should exist?

[Mirdarthos]

I think there is, but I don’t know what it is, my locale and everything being set to English.

But you might be able to find more assistance on the German Forum:

https://www.manjaro-forum.de/index.php

[n2o]

Wow I never even came across that forum, thanks a lot for the link!

Update: trying to find a way to post in the other forum. So far no way found

[beermad]

It would be worth checking that konsole has the right character encoding set, ie UTF-8.
Right-click=>Edit current profile=>advanced

[n2o]

Thank you, @beermad (me too btw) I did - all is as (I deem) it’s supposed to be.

[n2o]

Update: the folks at the KDE forum found the problem! As I thought it was a stupid mistake: you can set the locale “en_DE” in the UI but the locale itself doesn’t really exist. It’s hard to spot the difference in the system settings or rather be aware of the difference if you’re not 100% into what’s going to happen when you choose one or the other. Also, I will file a bug as those options shouldn’t be there if they don’t work.

Thanks everyone for your help and cheers to this awesome distro and DE!

[anon51566685]

@n2o

Also, I will file a bug as those options shouldn’t be there if they don’t work.

Don’t bother, it’s a known thing. The problem is that those locales don’t exist in glibc.

[n2o]

Thanks for the tip!