Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote on 2001-04-17 21:37 UTC:
> Tue, 10 Apr 2001 09:44:58 +0100, Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> pisze:
> > I understand, that there are also the block graphic characters. If
> > you live in a world where you use mostly double-width glyphs in
> > terminal emulators, it might be convenient to also have double-width
> > block graphics characters.
>
> I use single-width glyphs exclusively, including block graphics.
> The Linux console doesn't support double-width anyway (at least in
> 2.2.x kernels).
>
> > The answer of the Unicode consortium is very simple here: Nobody
> > should be using the block graphics characters anyway. their use is
> > deprecated, and they are only in Unicode to guarantee round-trip
> > compatibility with legacy sets.
>
> This advice is nonsense. What should be used instead in an API for
> terminal drawing, if it uses Unicode otherwise anyway?
I know. However, if you read the Unicode standard, it will become very
apparent that it's authors clearly did not think in terms of terminal
emulators. They thought in terms of word processing documents and web
pages, in terms of typesetting, paragraph formatting and proportional
fonts. The UCS authors on the other hand very clearly had also
applications such as terminal emulators in mind (which is why they talk
about ISO 6429, though they clearly didn't specify solutions to all
terminal-emulator related problems). That just as a general warning to
people who might think that the Unicode bidi algorithm is directly
suitable for implementation in a terminal emulator, etc.
The reason why
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr11/
exists is primarily because of encoding conversion concerns, not because
of terminal emulation. Microsoft for instance is quietly phasing out
anything that looks remotely like a terminal emulator from its platform
concept (the command prompt is already mostly gone from the Windows 2000
Workstation Edition for instance).
A few more background thoughts on this:
Japanese typography doesn't use proportional fonts at all, so the
distinction between narrow and wide character versions shows up in Japan
even in typesetting. There is one deep reason behind some of the flame
wars and misunderstandings that we have here from time to time: In
Europe formatted plaintext files is naturally considered to be a far
more primitive representation of text than proper typography. In Europe,
plaintext is just able to represent the output of antique typewriters
and teletypers with very restricted glyph repertoirs and no style
variation, not even proportional fonts. In Japan on the other hand, what
formatted plaintext provides is very close to what proper typography
provides. Style variations like bold or italic are not commonly used,
wide characters are monospaced anyway and the traditional 16-bit
character sets contain almost the full repertoire of typographic
characters. So while in Europe we see plaintext as a primitive
compromise anyway, in Japan it is all that most people need to write
text, unless they want to have fancy graphic design with colors and
different font sizes.
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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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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