Re: FreeBSD i18n fonts for wscons

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

On 1 February 2010 20:18, Matthias Drochner 
<M.Drochner%fz-juelich.de@localhost> wrote:
>
>> But this is not exactly how a real vt does it. ÂI 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
> Â people. The encodings used are well known, and I think my
> Â scheme of having full knowledge of the font contents in the
> Â kernel is more powerful because one can mix languages, switch
> Â encodings without switching fonts etc.
>
> 2. pseudo graphics, as in your example. OK, that's arguably
> Â somewhat special and needs external help to get the graphics
> Â 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

Why so limited? The code need not have apriori knowledge of any
encoding other then "C" ASCII. Everything else can be configured by
loading a translation table together with a font. That way you can
have fonts that cover, say several of ISO-8859-n.

Thanks

Michal