Re: Unicode-based FreeBSD

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 03:16:43PM +0400, Alexander Churanov wrote:
> Thomas,
> 
> 2008/8/23, Thomas Dickey <dickey_at_radix.net>:
> >
> > ...but it does help if the terminal can display the result.
> >
> > ...before IUTF8, there was some consensus for a few years that it was
> > up to the application to do proper backspacing.  (ncurses does this anyway,
> > but apparently shell interpreters such as bash need extra assistance).
> >
> In brief my idea is that system and applications use UTF-8 and syscond just
> maps UTF-8 to 256 (or whatever) characters it is actually able to display.
> This is very similar to current screenmaps, but new maps will just describe
> what 256 characters of the whole unicode range can be actually displayed.
> Or, in other words, always map from UTF-8.

There are many applications that do not yet support UTF-8.  
It would be bad if applications that just output 8-bit characters "as-is"
were broken.
If an application were to output characters from (e.g.) ISO-8859-1 and
syscons were to interpret them as UTF-8 it would not be pretty.

> 
> Then, since syscons is going to be unicode-aware, it can do proper
> backspacing if it is given a sequence of 4 bytes where first 3 describe a
> single code point and fourth is a backslash. In my opinion, this solution
> would mostly keep current applications running correctly and introduce the
> ability to use UTF-8 IO.

I suspect it would actually break many current applications.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013_at_student.uu.se