Re: FreeBSD i18n fonts for wscons

[Matthias Drochner <M.Drochner%fz-juelich.de@localhost>]

> But this is not exactly how a real vt does it.  I tried to explain
> that in my previous email.

And I tried to explain in my previous mail that I think it is a good
idea to keep a clean abstraction boundary between display and
emulation code. In particular, a wsemul layer should not make
assumptions about the format or the size of a font used by a display
device.

> But when a loadable font is used you absolutely don't want to know
> anything about "encoding" of data coming to the tty from the system.

There are two things one might want to accomplish:

1. i18n support: This is probably what is of interest for more
   people. The encodings used are well known, and I think my
   scheme of having full knowledge of the font contents in the
   kernel is more powerful because one can mix languages, switch
   encodings without switching fonts etc.

2. pseudo graphics, as in your example. OK, that's arguably
   somewhat special and needs external help to get the graphics
   segments into a fitting font shape.

> just what are unicode codepoints for some of the glyphs
> used there?

So, as a compromise, lets define a font encoding "custom" or so,
known to wsfontload and the display drivers in question. Then
reserve 128 or 256 positions in the pseudo-unicode space which
is used by "mapchar".
The wsemul driver can then use these symbolic names to get
at the downloaded font. (This is of course subject of the
usual selection and replacement algorithm, but as long as
no other font overrides it, it should just work.)

I'm aware of the fact that this can be used for i18n as
well, but I'd really prefer to do that "the right way".

best regards
Matthias



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