Re: [Lynx-dev] lynx word bleeding?

[Bela Lubkin]

Karen Lewellen wrote:

> Honestly?
> Well I must have an advantage using a DOS screen reading program arctic
> business vision to come here, as I have never encountered the slight
> character overlay I am getting now, and it does not show up everywhere
> either.
> the control-l solution is working fine though on those few moments.
> Have never encountered the  page problem one  until  this particular DOS
> computer which is much faster than any I have used previously with a
> faster processor and almost a gig of  memory.

You said this wasn't happening, and then it started happening.  So
something changed to cause it.

This faster 1-gig PC, how long ago did you switch to it?  Did the
problem start at the same time?

I don't anything about the Arctic screen reader you're using.  Is it
truly a screen reader (does nothing else); or does it also handle the
terminal emulation which collects the screens which it then reads?

The issue you're having is entirely typical of when the software making
the display using ESC sequences (here, Lynx via probably ncurses) is
using a different terminal type definition than the software
interpreting the ESC sequences (whatever terminal emulator you're using
-- built into Arctic or separate).

'using a different definition' can mean something like one things
'VT100' while the other thinks 'ANSI'.  But even if the names are the
*same*, there is no guarantee their interpretations of them are the
same.  At this point in history, telling a piece of Unix-ish software
that you have a 'vt100' probably produces fairly similar results on
almost all systems.  But terminal emulators which claim to emulate
'vt100' are all over the map.

So, did you switch terminal emulators?  Upgrade versions?  Change which
terminal type it is instructed to emulate?  If your terminal program
settings got erased and you had to re-create them, you might have
inadvertently changed it (by way of having set it to some non-default
value in the past, and now it's reset back to default).

To clarify some of the above tangle down to bare bones; to the thing I
think is most likely to have happened:

* If you changed anything about your terminal emulator -- different
emulator, version update, reinstall, whatever -- you probably fell back
to its default terminal type.  You need to make it match (in terms of
compatibility, *not* merely name) with what Lynx thinks you're using.

A particularly likely, common mismatch is if one thinks 'vt100' and the
other thinks 'ansi', 'xterm', or 'linux'.  Those are all 'compatible
enough' that Lynx will behave adequately well -- with some glitches like
words left behind after a screen update.

One way to approach it is: look at the emulator's list of possible
emulations.  For each one, tell the emulator to use that; tell Lynx the
same name; TEST.  So if the emulator supports 'vt52', tell it to use
that, then set TERM=vt52 and run Lynx -- does it behave better or worse?
Iterate through all the choices until you find a setting which pairs up
well.  ('set TERM=vt52 and run Lynx' is itself a possible area of
confusion depending how accounts are set up on the system, your
familiarity with *ix shells, etc.)

>Bela<