You, Marco van de Voort, were spotted writing this on Wed, Apr 05, 2000 at 02:10:35PM
+0100:
>
>
> I'm sorry that I maybe missed part of the thread, but what parts that should get
> UNICODE support are we thinking of?
I have suggested adding Unicode support in the keyboard driver and the
vga driver (more precisely, vga and syscons). As a result of such changes:
a) keymap files would map keycodes to the desired Unicode values rather
than 8-bit values depending on a particular encoding, which should
greatly simplify /usr/share/syscons/keymaps and let applications
that desire so obtain Unicode input directly;
b) font files would map Unicode chars, rather than encoding-dependent
chars, to glyphs. That would greatly simplify /usr/share/syscons/fonts,
get rid of a huge amount of redundant information there, and allow
creation of unified font files describing many languages at once.
c) vga code would be changed to allow 512-characters hardware fonts in
text modes, which will suffice to hold several languages at once. Moreover,
in raster modes (which are pseudo-text modes -- graphic modes with
fast text rendering) any amount of Unicode glyphs could be displayed
at once.
d) userland applications wouldn't feel a thing, and will continue
to receive pure 8-bit stream translated from/to Unicode by syscons by
way of a user-supplied encoding table. UTF-8 may play a role of
one such particular table, which will in future allow easy way
to modify userland applications to support UTF-8 if desired.
I am willing to do this work ( a)-d) ), have a good understanding of
the issues involved, etc. However I am neither a committer nor a
member of -core. If -core thinks this whole thing is a Bad Idea,
my changes won't get reviewed and/or committed, and I don't want to do
a lot of work to find out later it won't get into FreeBSD. This
is why I've asked for an endorsement from the People Who Decide
Things: not a guarantee, of course, that whatever I do will be
welcomed, but rather an acknowledgement that this is a Worthy Issue
and if my diffs are working well and answer the needed criteria,
they will be reviewed and committed.
--
Anatoly Vorobey,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pobox.com/~mellon/
"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton
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