Re: FreeBSD i18n fonts for wscons

[Geert Hendrickx <ghen%telenet.be@localhost>]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 10:58:15PM +0000, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
> Geert Hendrickx <ghen%telenet.be@localhost> wrote:
> 
> > Can we import the other console fonts from FreeBSD, too?  I tried their
> > koi8-r.816 and it gave me a working Russian wscons (ru_RU.KOI8-R locale).
> 
> If memory serves (it's been quite a while since I used FreeBSD), the
> usual modus operandi under FreeBSD is to use cp866 (and other DOS
> codepages) recoding program output -> screen (koi8-r to cp866, latin-1
> -> cp437, etc).  This is needed to get smooth, connected line-drawing
> (aka box-drawing, aka pseudographic) characters since VGA hardware
> automagically clones 8th column into 9th column for glyphs that are
> pseudographic in cp437.  Try to run mutt with "set noascii_chars" or
> nethack -dec on console.




Yes, you're right.  FreeBSD's syscons(4) console driver has the ability to
transparantly map codepoints between (compatible) charsets to avoid this
problem, so applications don't have to care about it.  This mapping can be
loaded via vidcontrol(1) (their equivalent of wsconsctl(1)), together with
the font.


Is this something we'd want in NetBSD as well?  It could serve as a nice
little introduction into the kernel for me. :-)


        Geert


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Geert Hendrickx  -=-  ghen%telenet.be@localhost  -=-  PGP: 0xC4BB9E9F
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