Re: FreeBSD i18n fonts for wscons

[Michal Suchanek <hramrach%centrum.cz@localhost>]

2010/1/22 Valeriy E. Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>:
> Matthias Drochner <M.Drochner%fz-juelich.de@localhost> wrote:
>
>> [from Lubomir's article]
>>> Add a line for that font to wscons.conf(5)
>>> font Âlatin2 Â- Â16 Âiso Â/usr/share/wscons/fonts/isolat2.816
>>
>> Well, this is a hack. A harmless one, and this has been done
>> before, but it is still a hack. What this does is to load a latin2
>> encoded font but pretends that it is an "iso" one (which
>> means latin1). It leads to the desired result because the
>> vt100 emulation just maps chracters 128..255 to the corresponding
>> ISO font positions (following the behavior of a real VT100).
>> Loading another font as "iso" changes the visual representation
>> behind the vt100's back.

That's how terminals traditionally work. You wanted different letters
so you uploaded a font and used a matching encoding in the programs
running on the terminal. If you load a new font the glyphs change but
the terminal does not care.
BTW latin2 is also an iso standard so if it is not iso in NetBSD then
NetBSD way of naming things is quite odd.

> The alternative is to define a new font encdoing and provide
> (hardcoded!) Âconversion tables that first map national charset C1 to
> unicode and then another conversion that effecitively maps unciode
> back to C1, where it all started in the first place! ÂThat just
> doesn't scale.

You don't need hardcoded tables in kernel if you load the table with
the font (or just allow loading a table).

Traditionally the terminal would support one or a few 8-bit or 7-bit
fonts but these days a terminal which can display unicode is more
desirable. While this is possible in graphics the VGA text mode is
limited to 256 different characters displayed on a single terminal but
there is nobody saying that the 256 characters cannot change over
time, perhaps even quite rapidly as you scroll through some Chinese
text.

Thanks

Michal