> > lists the characters one after another. Pango (I use Gnome for > > everything else) should do it at least a bit better, but the results > > will probably not be the same.
Mlterm (http://mlterm.sourceforge.net/) is a multilingual-capable terminal emulator which handles combining characters. Mlterm with a console-based mail reader like mutt works pretty well. However, one is still at the mercy of the fonts. Even an OpenType font which handles diacritic stacking may still not place diacritics properly for Vietnamese unless that font was really designed with vietnamese in mind. And, supposing you do find a font with very nice typographic placement of diacritics for Vietnamese, that same font might not work so well for Greek, for example. So, the current situation is that in practice you get more readable results when your unicode text actually uses the code points for the precomposed glyphs. > > Hi, > > Slightly based on it, I have some questions with the combining characters. > It's clear to me how they should be handled if the complete text to be > displayed in known in advance. But I don't know what has to be done if one > tries to display a real-time text flow. > > Just think of a talk/ytalk enhancement working with UTF-8 encoding and NFD > representation. And network lags... > > Maybe I type an "�", first "a" is sent over the network, then for some > reason some packets are lost or there's a short network failure, and the > combining acute is only sent five seconds later. The receiver party has to > first display an "a" since it doesn't know it's going to be continued. Then > later it has to be able to put an accent over the already displayed > character. > > What's the design rationale of the combining character following instead of > preceding the letter itself? Just think of TeX's \'a, or the combining > character feature of linux console and X window, here always the accent is > entered first, which makes it much easier to handle these input streams. Maybe the rationale was based on the simple fact that when you write on a piece of paper, you write the "a" first, then the accent or other diacritical marks ... If the software is smart, it will know that the combining diacritical marks need to combine with the preceding letter. Not a big deal in my opinion: you won't be able to read whatever someone is trying to send you via whatever instant messenger protocol you want to name until the network bottle neck is resolved anyway -- and receiving the "a" first probably would have you guessing the word much faster than receiving just the diacritical marks, n'est-ce-pas? > > What is backspace supposed to do with NFD unicode streams? Should it delete > one unicode entity (that is only the accent from the top of a letter) or a > complete combined character? > > > thx, > > Egmont > > -- > Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels > Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/ > > > -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
