Re: UTF-8, OSTA-UDF [why?], Unicode, and miscellaneous gibberish

Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl
Wed, 20 Aug 1997 18:33:41 +0200 (MET DST)


Marcin Dalecki:

: ... Actually I tried to get the
: bordering chars in /usr/src/linuc# make menuconfig <ENTER> right with
: Latin-2 fonts. It was FAR easier to provide an appriopritae
: termcap/terminfo entry for this font encoding then to use any of the output
: remapping stuff from kbd-0.94.

I can imagine. There is no remapping stuff in kbd-0.94 that could
accomplish this, I suppose.

These borders are made by [n]curses using the information from
the acsc capability. (According to the specs they have to be
surrounded by smacs and rmacs strings. Menuconfig does not do
this - a bug either in menuconfig or in ncurses.)

This acsc capability assigns single bytes to "top left corner", etc.
Unicode values are not usable in this context. (It is a terminfo
design flaw that they used single bytes instead of strings.)

So, if you load a font, then you have to edit the terminfo
description of the terminal and tell in the acsc string the
byte value of your line drawing characters.
If there are no line drawing characters in the font, then delete
the acsc capability, and you will get +------+ borders.

(Note that also people using Latin-1 will have this problem:
after "setfont iso01.f16" the line-drawing characters are gone.)

: So Linus please take of all of the uncide stuff ot of the kernel.
: If it would be even usable it doesn't belong there anyway....

People from the Baltic countries, from Ethiopia, from Thailand,
from Vietnam send me Unicode stuff. It looks like there do exist users,
especially among people needing two or three of the ISO 8859-N
character sets simultaneously.

It is a pity that development seems to have stopped, so that
the use is still as inconvenient as it was two years ago.

Andries