CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsfontsconsolecurses
hpsMouse
hpsMouse

Reputation: 2014

Which characters to choose when "drawing" a box on Windows console?

I'm trying to port a curses program to Windows. Now one of the problems is that the default ACS_XXXX characters become double-width on Windows console, thus breaking the alignment.

I tried looking for other characters to do the job, like '-' or '|' in basic ASCII, but none of them looks good because the line is not continuous. And finding characters to "draw" corners seems more difficult.

Are there any commonly used characters in such a situation?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 5008

Answers (3)

David Ko
David Ko

Reputation: 11

I got it to work using the MingLiu font. That is, to draw boxes around Chinese characters with ASCII characters without any alignment issues.

Upvotes: 1

Michael Madsen
Michael Madsen

Reputation: 55009

There are a few box drawing characters that were available in the old DOS days - you should be able to use those.

However, keep in mind that the Windows console may require some jumping through hoops to output this as Unicode, which might be a problem unless you accept that your code editor is unlikely to display the character correctly. Michael Kaplan summarizes the problem quite nicely, with information about how to get around this.

Upvotes: 0

JoshD
JoshD

Reputation: 12814

There are border characters in the system font. This includes joints, corners, and both double and single edges. They appear in the higher positions.

Check out http://www.asciitable.com/ for details. They range from 179 to 218 (decimal) in the extended ascii table.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions