Hi all,

 I need some info on printing Multibyte (UTF-8 encoding)
characters using 'lp' series commands. Looking forward for your 
valuable reply.

 

Regards

Harish.












-----Original Message-----
From: Markus Kuhn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: 2004年3月2日 0:58
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: relevance of "[PATCH] tty utf8 mode" in linux-kernel 2.6.4-rc1 


Bruno Haible wrote on 2004-03-01 16:59 UTC:
> There is also the problem of the TAB: Currently 
> linux/drivers/char/n_tty.c also transforms a TAB to a sequences of 
> spaces, and an erase of a TAB to a sequence of BACKSPACEs. If we keep 
> it this way, the kernel must still learn to distinguish single-width 
> and double-width characters, in order to keep a notion of "current 
> column number".

I believe, the TAB is just another good example of why we have to move away in 
terminal emulations from the notion of a matrix of glyph cells as the fundamentally 
underlying state, towards a notion of a list of lines (later even paragraphs?) of 
characters, each with variable width. Since some applications have elevated the TAB to 
a full character of its own right ("make" most notably), we should expect it to be 
preserved properly when we cut and paste from one terminal screen into another one. 
That of course can only work, if the TAB character is echoed intact, like any other 
real character, back to the terminal, and is not substituted by spaces. The state of a 
terminal is then much closer to a plaintext file, where sending and echoing a 
character inserts a character, and where a backspace deletes a character. The terminal 
protocol's semantics would become defined in terms of edit operations on a plain-text 
file.

What we really need is a successor specification for ECMA-48 and ISO 6429, which 
clearly distinguishes control functions that operate on pixel coordinates from control 
functions that operate on character coordinates and modify the underlying text-file 
notion of the screen's current state. With luck, it may be possible to do this in a 
backwards-compatible way.

[BTW: Would some company or funding organization here have a lot of interest in 
terminals and "thin clients" that can be controlled conveniently via printf? I would 
actually be quite happy to set up a research project to design and flesh out a really 
nice and proper son-of-ISO-6429 standard, optimized for contemporary hardware 
capabilities and user requirements, along with a production-quality reference 
implementation for X11. Contact me, if you are interested in a more detailed project 
proposal.]

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | 
__oo_O..O_oo__


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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/


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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/

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