Hi list
I have tried to use UTF-8 in the Linux Console (i386/VGA textmode),
and found that it is a problem that the fonts have to few
characters.
I sometimes need to write and display texts with both Danish and
Esperanto letters, and maybe some graphical line drawing characters
etc. Sometimes I want some greek letters to mathematical formulas.
Sometimes some other characters for some special purposes.
But I don't think that I ever need to have more than 256 different
characters at the same time. So I thought about if it was possible
to make a system like this:
- The VGA hardware uses a 256 character font as usual.
- You can specify some large font with a lot of characters to
select these 256 characters from.
- Whenever you try to write out a character which isn't in the
hardware font, then the needed character will automatically be
loaded from the specified font to some unused character slot in
the hardware font.
I would like to hear if it would be possible to implement anything
like this, and if you have comments or suggestions.
NB. I do know that 512 character fonts also are possible. In fact I
currently use the LatArCyrHeb-08/14/16/19.psf fonts from the
console-tools package to show mixed Danish/Esperanto texts, but I
prefer to use 256 character fonts whenever possible.
You lose the possibility to use bright colors using 512 character
fonts because there only are 16 bits to describe each character
position on the screen, and when you need an extra bit to select
the character, you unfortunately have one bit fewer to specify the
color.
--
Byrial
http://home.worldonline.dk/~byrial/
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
