Re: Linux Unicode user-space console driver

[GOTO Masanori <gotom@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Linux Unicode user-space console driver
> Does anyone have one of these?

I know 3 software to achive the written in subject:
jfbterm (http://www3.justnet.ne.jp/~nmasu/linux/jfbterm/indexn.html),
KON (Kanji COnsole),
console-tools (http://www.multimania.com/ydirson/en/lct/).

The console-tools have already ability to display UTF-8
(it have "UTF-8 mode").
However, Yann Dirson (who are the author of console-tools) tell me 
that the native console on linux/i386 (VGA) cannot display more
than 512 characters, so an encoding which needs many characters
may appear incompletely or may not display.

> The closest I've found is jfbterm, based on a program called KON,
> which uses PCF fixed fonts and understands various Asian encodings,
> and bogl, which reads BDF proportional fonts and is part of a mini
> window system rather than a console. Both use the Linux framebuffer
> device, and neither works with UCS.

jfbterm uses the Linux frame buffer, but KON does not use.
KON displays KANJI characters directly.

> I thought I might be able to adapt jfbterm to work with Unicode, but
> the documentation is in Japanese, and it appears to convert fonts via
> some Asian-specific terminal font structure, so I got bogged down in
> details which are of no interest to me.

Contact the original author of jfbterm (Noritoshi MASUICHI).
There is also the mailing list for development. Do you subscribe it?
I don't see such a mail recently.

Displaying almost all UTF-8 characters on console on any system is
*very* difficult issue. For example, Debian and Debian JP Project
have developed Debian boot disk. Default boot disk can display
only ASCII, or ISO-8859-* encodings, on the contrary, we use multibyte
characters. So we investigated the 3 software of above described, 
results are:
* KON requires VGA console. Execept for PC/AT architecture, KON cannot run.
* console-tools cannot show many characters.
* jfbterm requires kernel frame buffer support, in addition, a video
  cards which used by user have to be supported by kernel fb
  (Recently, it seems that the status of frame buffer becomes properly).
At the last, we selected jfbterm (however, there remains many works
to run normally...).

> If nothing better is available and I continue to find jfbterm
> inscrutible, I might try to write something from scratch, in which
> case I would be grateful if anyone could point me at documentation or
> examples of how to read PCF fonts. Documentation or examples of how to
> address the framebuffer in a portable fashion would be useful, too,
> but I think I know of better places to ask about that ...

IMHO, using jfbterm is good method to achive your thought.

Regards,
-- GOTO Masanori
-
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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