Followup to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
By author: Jarkko Hietaniemi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
In newsgroup: linux.utf8
>
> I think that "displaying UTF-8 text" is quite a difficult task. Not
> only would you need a really large font -- both a number of glyphs (or
> an ingenious font switching scheme), and to support the most intricate
> CJK glyphs I hear that at least a 20pt font is required.
>
> Moreover, the old way of thinking "one codepoint, one box" isn't going
> to work with combining characters (and keeping on piling the combining
> characters pushes the capabilities of the font rendering). Don't forget
> ligatures, and I do not mean only the Latin ones: think Arabic, or Indic.
>
> Add to that bidi, and we are getting close to the question "can any
> program honestly display Unicode without any buts and ifs"? Something
> that might come the closest (sorry to mention this, but if you have an
> issue with this, don't blame me, and please prove me wrong) is
> Microsoft Word, but even then only if you have the right localization
> kits (or whatever is the right term for that in MS-speak) installed.
>
> Mind, I would be (plesantly) surprised if there really is a 'terminal'
> that can justice to the intricacies of Unicode. At the time the Plan
> 9's 9term probably was close, but Unicode has moved on since. On an
> xterm, sure, you can have the fonts, but probably not the combining
> characters. Yudit, ditto.
>
It is all a matter of your ambition level. There is a canyon between
displaying US-ASCII or even ISO-8859-1 correctly and displaying
arbitrary Unicode correctly. In between there are a lot of useful
intermediate points, however, by using subsets of Unicode rather than
an ad hoc encoding the expansion can be done incrementally, without
the hideous pain that we currently have to go through every time
something minor changes, like someone invents a new currently and
decides it needs a symbol, or someone puts a new keycap on a
keyboard...
-hpa
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"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
