Re: Linux Console in UTF-8 - global direction vector

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Maiorana, Jason" wrote on 2002-10-01 14:07 UTC:
> >I would argue strongly that we do NOT want the console to do anything
> >other than traditional VT100-style left-to-right text output. Bidi or
> >quaddi output are best left to specialized applications
> 
> I imagine though, that it would be possible to have a simple, cell
> oriented terminal with a global writing direction vector(rowdir,coldir)
> Then at least it would be possible to have a command line in pure
> hebrew or mongolian.

A pure right-to-left or top-to-down mode would be rather trivial to
implement, but I am skeptical it would be particularly satisfactory for
any users. When interacting with Unix, it is unavoidable that you will
always encounter lots of text in left-to-right scripts (English
messages, domain names, how do you write English/Hebrew pathnames?,
etc.), and I'm not sure how popular reading English in RTL form would
be. But then, may be I underestimate the market for this. Have a look at

  http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/

to get a feeling for this (it has a bug/feature though: you have to
type backwards).

> Multi directional support is harder

and the only appropriate level, I would argue. I think, the global market for
purely RTL video terminals collapsed sometimes around 50 B.C. ... ;-)

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
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/