From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Apr 5 14:30:51 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from sasami.jurai.net (sasami.jurai.net [63.67.141.99]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D385137B888 for ; Wed, 5 Apr 2000 14:30:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mellon@jurai.net) Received: (from mellon@localhost) by sasami.jurai.net (8.9.3/8.8.7) id RAA00486; Wed, 5 Apr 2000 17:30:38 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 17:30:38 -0400 From: Anatoly Vorobey To: Marco van de Voort Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD Message-ID: <20000405173037.A460@sasami.jurai.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: <20000405121135.8E3702E802@hermes.tue.nl>; from marcov@stack.nl on Wed, Apr 05, 2000 at 02:10:35PM +0100 X-Disclaimer: I was young, I needed the money! Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG You, Marco van de Voort, were spotted writing this on Wed, Apr 05, 2000 at 02:10:35PM +0100: > > > I'm sorry that I maybe missed part of the thread, but what parts that should get > UNICODE support are we thinking of? I have suggested adding Unicode support in the keyboard driver and the vga driver (more precisely, vga and syscons). As a result of such changes: a) keymap files would map keycodes to the desired Unicode values rather than 8-bit values depending on a particular encoding, which should greatly simplify /usr/share/syscons/keymaps and let applications that desire so obtain Unicode input directly; b) font files would map Unicode chars, rather than encoding-dependent chars, to glyphs. That would greatly simplify /usr/share/syscons/fonts, get rid of a huge amount of redundant information there, and allow creation of unified font files describing many languages at once. c) vga code would be changed to allow 512-characters hardware fonts in text modes, which will suffice to hold several languages at once. Moreover, in raster modes (which are pseudo-text modes -- graphic modes with fast text rendering) any amount of Unicode glyphs could be displayed at once. d) userland applications wouldn't feel a thing, and will continue to receive pure 8-bit stream translated from/to Unicode by syscons by way of a user-supplied encoding table. UTF-8 may play a role of one such particular table, which will in future allow easy way to modify userland applications to support UTF-8 if desired. I am willing to do this work ( a)-d) ), have a good understanding of the issues involved, etc. However I am neither a committer nor a member of -core. If -core thinks this whole thing is a Bad Idea, my changes won't get reviewed and/or committed, and I don't want to do a lot of work to find out later it won't get into FreeBSD. This is why I've asked for an endorsement from the People Who Decide Things: not a guarantee, of course, that whatever I do will be welcomed, but rather an acknowledgement that this is a Worthy Issue and if my diffs are working well and answer the needed criteria, they will be reviewed and committed. -- Anatoly Vorobey, mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/ "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message