Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2000 12:13:14 +0900 From: Kazutaka YOKOTA <yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp> To: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org, yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD Message-ID: <200004070313.MAA03369@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 05 Apr 2000 17:30:38 -0400." <20000405173037.A460@sasami.jurai.net> References: <20000405173037.A460@sasami.jurai.net>
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>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; As you are well aware, the keyboard driver (and keyboard related part of syscons has no knowledge about the character code generated via the keymap. Thus, we will need little or no modification to handle Unicode-based keymaps. >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. Um, well, we may be able to use a unified font file for many languages. But, do not expect that we will be able to create a single font file which will be suitable for ALL languages. That's simply impossible for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, because of the problem (deficiency) of the Han unification done in the Unicode. (That is my understanding.) >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, The pcvt driver already uses 512 chars. >in raster modes (which are pseudo-text modes -- graphic modes with >fast text rendering) any amount of Unicode glyphs could be displayed >at once. If we intend to display any languages at once in the console, the raster mode is the only solution. I agree. But, we need a fair amount of knowledge about the language/script we are dealing with, in order to display its text correctly. I don't think that a single set of Unicode->glyph mapper and font renderer is fit for the purpose. We still need language/script- specific modules. >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. Sure. >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. Multilingual text processing in the userland is a completely different issue which, I think, should be discussed separately. >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. We need more discussion to design a reasoble implementation (compromise :-) which does not make lives of some people difficult by imposing a single rigid scheme. Unicode, as it stands now, does not seem to be THE solution which addresses all the issues/problems/complexities of the languages in the world... It can be viewed/used as a tool, though. Kazu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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