Re: FreeBSD i18n fonts for wscons

[Adam Hamsik <haaaad%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Jan,Tuesday 19 2010, at 11:14 PM, Geert Hendrickx wrote:

> 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. :-)

Please add it to gsoc projects page then ? maybe it will interest some student 
this year.

Regards

Adam.