Markus,
Thanks for writing the document in
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/scw-proposal.html
I am not very keen on adding yet another piece of state to terminal
emulators. Adding something like SCW would require all term{cap,info}
entries for terminal initialisation to be updated to include SCW(0),
and would be yet another source of puzzlement to users (``I swear the
columns did align when I last tried that out!'').
My preference would be for a set of single shifts. By default, the
terminal emulator behaves according to some well defined set of widths
(say, as in UTR 11). There are three sequences, call them ``width
override'':
WO0: next character has width 0;
WO1: next character has width 1;
WO2: next character has width 2.
These sequences can be emitted by the application (e.g. a Unicode-based
Emacs, or MULE with Unicode support), or inserted by a layer such as luit.
The fact that applications need to be adapted to emit the WO is a
non-issue, as they can very well be emitted by luit in a user- or
locale-configurable manner. I don't think that the additional traffic
that they will generate is an issue.
Regards,
Juliusz
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
