On Wed, 12 Sep 2001, Steve Swales wrote:
> XIM is working very well with the CSI (code-set independent) version of xterm
> provided by Li18nux.org (patches from IBM). It works equally well in our UTF-8
> locales and our non-UTF-8 locales. Because of this (CSI), Sun will be adopting
> this version of xterm, rather than the utf-8 hardwired one, for a future release
> of Solaris. We are working with the patch developers to enhance and extend this
> implementation to make it a fully functional, code-set independent,
> internationalized terminal emulator. We will, obviously, be providing these
> enhancements back to the community, and Sun will be promoting this xterm at
> X.Org as well.
I'm looking forward to see these enhancements to the X.Org xterm.
Like Juliusz, I hope that Sun is aware that the current CSI API provides a
functionality significantly more restricted to what our existing hardwired
xterm offers already. I hope Sun is fully aware of the significant
extensions that have to be made to the CSI concept (which was originally
purely developed with the requirements of ISO 8859 and CJK legacy
encodings in mind) in order to cover the additional specific functionality
required for proper Unicode support.
Before XFree86 considers abandoning its current xterm UCS extensions,
I'd hope that Sun's CSI equivalent will feature equivalent functionality,
for example:
- Support of at least up to two overstriking combining characters
as they are essential for support of the Thai, Laos and other
scripts.
- Selection of glyphs from the single-width and double-width font
based on either libc wcwidth() or the current XFree86 convention
documented in
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/wcwidth.c
- Support for UTF8_STRING selections independent of the current locale,
in order to facilitate the simple and effective exchange of data
between applications running in different locales or the many
important already existing Unicode-only applications.
I also recommend a careful comparison of the currently used rather buggy
and incomplete X.Org keysym->Unicode table with the more up-to-date
XFree86 table on
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/keysym2ucs.c
If you are working on a XIM for UTF-8 locales, I'd also like to draw your
attention to
ISO/IEC 14755
Information Technology -- Input methods to enter characters from
the repertoire of ISO/IEC 10646 with a keyboard or other input
devices
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/ISO-14755.pdf
which describes a number of basic universal character entry methods
that would be extremely useful to have integrated into XIM, such that
independent of the current locale, characters can always also be entered
into any application via their Unicode hex value.
Our experience has been that the interactions of UTF-8 and the VT100
semantics offered by xterm can be very tricky and I'd like to encourage
you to make development snapshorts of your xterm release available for
alpha testing by Li18nux, XFree86, and text mode editor developers early
and often, such that we can provide thorough debugging and feedback for
the implementation long before it sets a standard by becoming part of an
X.Org release.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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