Problem

Line drawing not correctly displayed using Putty:

Wrong line drawing

Expected line drawing

Solutions

Putty version 0.71 and above

Set the new parameter "UTF8linedraw=1"

on Linux, add a line in .putty/sessions/yoursession containing this parameter (above)
on Windows, change settings from "Window" → "Translation" pane and check the button "Enable VT100 line drawing even in UTF-8 mode"

you can keep your locale / codepage as UTF-8.

Putty version 0.70 and below

Solution 1 - using xterm settings

Before opening the terminal session, load the saved session you want to use and update the following parameters:

Terminal-type string can be set to either xterm or vt200 for Linux or VMS and can only be defined to vt200 for Tru64

The "Remote character set" must be something else than the default UTF-8 depending on your location. Example: ISO-8859-1:1998 (Latin-1, West Europe)

It is possible some characters will not be displayed correctly using this method. Example:

The default font does not display boxes correctly. If you want to have a better look, please change the font in the "Window → Appearance" option and select either Consolas, Lucida Console or Terminal fonts rather than Courier New.

Solution 2 - using putty and Linux locale settings

On the Linux host:

Add these lines in your .bashrc file (if you're using bash):

test "$TERM" = "putty" && export LC_ALL=C || export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8

export TERM=xterm

In putty:

Window → Translation → Remote Character set: the default ISO-8859-1

Connection → Data → Terminal-type string "putty"

This solution solves the problem mentioned above

The default font does not display boxes correctly. If you want to have a better look, please change the font in the "Window → Appearance" option and select either Consolas, Lucida Console or Terminal fonts rather than Courier New.

Links

Download putty

Cannot get correct line drawing on Linux/UNIX with Putty

Table of contents