Robert de Bath wrote on 2002-09-11 18:58 UTC: > > Yes, I tend to ignore that. On the other hand, 255 and some > > characters are enough for a lot of languages (for example most > > ISO-8859 using languages). So UTF8 console (as you suggest) helps at > > least some people. > > Minor point, it's actually 512 characters; which is enough for MES-1 or > VSECS and probably other collections that I'm sure Markus can enumerate.
Even European/American/African users without any interest in non-Greek-derived scripts will find it difficult to agree on a common Unicode subset of only 256 or 512 characters for character cell terminal use. The easily agreeable set is larger, somewhere near MES-3, but not much. I'd say somewhere between 900 and 3000 glyphs would be needed, especially if we want to support italic style as well. European fonts of such moderate size could still be handled comfortably in kernel space. The only hurdle to abandon is the perfectly useless VGA text video mode. Time to say good bye to MS-DOS. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
