Re: UTF-8 curses

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

Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote on 1999-10-24 14:45 UTC:
> So it would be useful for me to have a better idea of when and with
> what probability characters with more than 16/24 bits might be useful
> in the context of curses. Thanks for any clues.

I'd summarize the situation as follows:

 - There will pretty certainly never any UCS characters above 0x10ffff
   be used, so you should be very comfortable with only reserving
   21 bits for a UCS character (leaves 11 bits for other attributes)

 - The characters that will go above 0xffff will mostly be found on clay
   tablets in the British Museum with amazingly low Carbon-14 concentrations.
   Plane 1+ characters are more reserved codes for special applications
   (most notably scholarly word processing) that are good to have
   available in a good publishing system, but that are much less likely
   to be urgently needed in simple VT100-style curses applications.
   You won't have hieroglyphs in the X11 fixed font any time soon.

So if there is a way to add support for non-BMP characters easily, then
no harm is done by doing it, but if it involves a lot of effort or use
of resources, I'd put it quite low on the priority list for curses.

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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