see mlterm, please — some of these are very useful display forms, and
already in use for character-cell terminal emulators.
as for triple-cell glyphs, see emacs w/arabic presentation forms.
On 8/20/06, Rich Felker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sat, Aug 19, 2006 at 11:20:55AM -0700, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote:
> sorry, cat-typing sent that email a bit early. here's the rest:
>
> for indic scripts and arabic having triple-cell ligatures is really
> indispensible for readable text.
>
> for east asian text a ttb, rtl columnar display mode is really, really
> nice.
For a terminal? Why? Do you want to see:
l
s
-
l
[...]
??? I suspect not. If anyone really does want this behavior, then by
all means they can make a terminal with different orientation. But
until I hear about someone really wanting this I'll assume such claims
come from faux-counter-imperial chauvinism where western academics in
ivory towers tell people in other cultures that they must "preserve
their traditions" for their own sake with no regard for practicality,
and end up doing nothing but _disadvantaging_ people.
> a passable job at least for CJK. how to handle single-cell vs.
> double-cell vs. triple-cell glyphs in vertical presentation is a
I've never heard of a triple-cell glyph. Certainly the "standard"
wcwidth (Kuhn's version) has no such thing.
> tricky problem - short runs (<= 2 cells) should probably be displayed
> as horizontal inclusions, longer runs should probably be rotated.
Nonsense. A terminal does not have the luxury to decide such things.
You're confusing "terminal" with "word processor" or maybe even with
TeX...
> why don't we have escape sequences for switching between the DBCS and
> non-DBCS cell behaviors, and for rotating the terminal display for
> vertical text vs. horizontal text?
Because it's not useful. Applications will not use it. All the
terminal emulator needs to do is:
1. display raw text in a form that's not offensive -- this is
necessary so that terminal-unaware programs just writing to stdout
will work.
2. provide cursor positioning functions (minimal) and (optionally)
scrolling/insert/delete and other small optimizations.
Anything more is just pure bloat because it won't be supported by
curses and applications are written either to curses or to vt102.
> Note that mixing vertical and
> horizontal is sometimes done in the typographic world but is probably
> not needed for terminal emulators (this requires a layout engine much
> more advanced than the unicode bidi algorithm, capable of laying out
This most certainly does not belong in a terminal emulator. Apps
(such as text based web browsers) wishing to do elegant
multi-orientation formatting can do the cursor positioning and such
themselves. Users preferring a vertical orientation can configure
their terminals as such. This is a matter of user preference, not
application control, and thus there should NOT be a way for
applications to control or override it.
Rich
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