Recently Markus Kuhn et'al wrote:
> Lots of interesting stuff about character widths.
I've been following this controversy because I've written some patches
to the best win32 telnet/ssh xterm emulator there is.
( Homepage: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
my Patches: http://www.cix.co.uk/~mayday/putty.html
)
Currently I've implemented Markus's wcwidth proposal with the ambigious
characters as single width; I thought it was settled at the time.
But the recent discussions have given me a question:
"Why do we want plaintext to use a Bi-Width font?"
I'm not arguing that editors and mail clients etc may want to do _paint_
the screen using multiple font widths but isn't a terminal _supposed_ to
use a single width for all characters _unless_ told to change the character
attributes ?
There was the quick hack of the DOS DBCS fonts but that still has the
width of the character _unambigiously_ defined by the host.
Under windows I don't and probably will never have the full Unix
multi-language support; supporting one set of widths is reasonable
but supporting lots (currently two yes but the next step is 'many')
of different character sets (sorry width sets) is starting to sound
very familiar.
I would say that a terminal emulator should (by default) render all
characters the same width. We ignore the UCS 'Source character set
character width' information. But in addition I'd take Florian Weimer's
idea of a special combining character to stretch the previous character
for display. (Is this U+303F ? or is that just a space?)
The advantages:
Multi-widths can be done within locale
Any configuration is on the unix host not Windoze.
If the use only wants to use one width (Latin or Han) then it's easy.
This may even be able to deal with Devengari!
The disadvantage:
Mixed Latin/Han may be an issue _but_ is it common outside this list
and does anybody who's using Han actually give a monkey about fat
Latin?
PS: If anyone has comments about the patched PuTTY please do mail me.
--
Rob. (Robert de Bath <http://poboxes.com/rdebath>)
<rdebath @ poboxes.com> <http://www.cix.co.uk/~mayday>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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