Date: 2 Apr 2000 18:33:21 +0200 From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD Message-ID: <8c7soh$179g$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <20000320194702.11223.qmail@web3101.mail.yahoo.com> <8bitar$2i4f$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> <20000329033908.A14122@happy.checkpoint.com> <20000402051559.A52041@happy.checkpoint.com>
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Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> wrote: > What do you think? For what it's worth (me not being a committer and generally not on the productive side of things), I morally support this idea. To push certain buttons: what you are suggesting is to bring syscons up to what the Linux console already supports in this respect. > - in raster modes (SC_PIXEL_MODE on, etc.) more than 256 characters can > now be trivially drawn. [...] I should point out that what you have outlined is very limited Unicode support. It's great for the primary European application of Unicode, i.e. having an extended character set that combines a character repertoire previously not available from 8-bit character sets, e.g. the ability to write both French and Russian in the same text. Without double-width and combining characters it won't be nearly as useful for Asian users, though, so don't expect rampant enthusiasm from that corner. Whether "full" Unicode support is desirable in a console driver is another question. > - the road is wide open for Unicode support in userland, through UTF-8. A UTF-8 capable xterm has been capable since, uh, last summer I think. It's in XFree86 4.0. The road is wide open already. It would be even more open, if the work done by the Linux people wasn't consistently GPLed and could be reused <sigh>. > - The format of screen font files must be changed. Hardly an issue. You'll have an array of glyphs and an array which associates a Unicode code point with each glyph. In fact, you just might want to use the same format the latest Linux console tools have already pioneered for this purpose. > - some rendering routines are slowed down due to the fact that simple > 8-bit array lookups are no longer available for getting characters' > information. This may be circumvented somewhat by smart searches/hash > tables. Linux uses some kind of hash tables. I don't know the implementation details, but speedwise the overhead appears to be negligible. Hint: For anybody interested in unicodification, the linux-utf8 mailing list is a must-read. I also think the creating of a freebsd-i18n list is long overdue. I18N issues are largely lost among the traffic on -hackers and -questions, and it has become something of a specialty area since most people appear to be served well by the existing non-solutions. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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