[RS] was asked the following, and herewith passes the questions on to the community:
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The story goes like this: I have a set of 8-bit BDF (or PCF) fonts
which are almost full in the sense that nearly 250 encodings are
occupied by glyphs. (Those not occupied are "forbidden" positions
like \x00 (NULL), \x09 (TAB), \x0a (CR), \xa0 ( ) etc.)
Older versions of Tcl/Tk in tandem with older X distributions
displayed all characters (in tk widgets) perfectly. Newer versions
of Tcl/Tk (and newer X distributions) do not display certain
characters correctly, for example, I am always getting a display of
\x01 as \x01 (and not as the glyph defined in the BDF files at
encoding 1).
 
If one has to use some kind of non-system encodings (like
Japanese, Korean, Hebrew etc.), one may use "encoding convertfrom"
or "encoding convertto" commands. "fconfigure -encoding" demands a
channel to read/write strings in specified encodings. "encoding
system", on the other hand, is something that may change the
overall application behavior.
 
But my problem seems to be fundamentally different. I have a string
to insert in a text widget / label / button, that contains \x01 in
the straightforward 8-bit encoding and I want to see the corresponding
glyph defined in the font files and not the escape sequence \x01.
Is there a way to do this?
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First idea is that one of the DOS codepage encodings delivered with Tcl since 8.1 can help. Watch this space for a code page browser...