Getting started

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote on 1999-08-27 21:33 UTC:
> Maybe I am asking for information you gave in other letters
> already, but before I start looking at the present state of
> keyboard/console driver, fonts and character support and the like,
> I would like to ask: can you describe the desired interface
> between keyboard/console driver, user, and application?
> Under X? On the console?
> 
> 
> I would like to have a plan, a goal to reach, and then work
> towards it in a long series of small steps.
> Maybe you can just point me towards some web page?
> If there is no such page, we might try and construct it.

Please read

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

It describes briefly what the new "xterm -u8" does (and how you can
install it), and what extensions will hopefully get into it soon (wide
characters for CJK and overstriking combining characters for Thai/Lao/
math/IPA/Navaho/etc.). From the application's point of view, the
console should follow along very similar paths obviously.

Other news: in

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz

you will now also find a new font 9x18.bdf, that is essentially a
beautified 9x15 font, with more head/foot space, such that combining
accents can work nicely and such that it is not necessary any more to
use a shrinked base character before you can fit an accent over it
(as it was necessary with most of the other "-misc-fixed-*" fonts.

9x18 will also go well together with the new 18x18 ideographic
font in

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts-asian.tar.gz

to provide bi-width Japanese output. For those of you who have never
used kterm and the like before: It is common practice to specify two
fonts, one x*y pixels wide, the other x*2y pixels wide, and the
ideographic characters are taken from the wide font (and occupy two
character cells), while the European characters come from the narrow
(normal) font. Unicode Technical Report #11 specifies, which Unicode
characters should be taken from the wider font in xterm and the
console.

I highly recommend that you install the new xterm from

  http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey/xterm/xterm.tar.gz

and the new fonts and have a look with just "cat" at the example/* and
*.repertoire-utf8 UTF-8 text files that come with the fonts. That's what
the console should be able to display as well.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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