Hello, Viorel. On Tue, Feb 11, 2025 at 21:36:31 +0200, Viorel Munteanu wrote: > La 11.02.2025 21:10, Alan Mackenzie a scris: > > Hello, Gentoo.
> > For the past few weeks, I've been working on enhancing the Linux console > > to display more than 256/512 glyphs. > > This afternoon, I finally succeeded in loading the font gsans16.psfu > > (the source is available in a tar ball from the maintainer of psftools's > > website). This font has 810 glyphs, and with it, I can at last see the > > names of East European posters correctly displayed. It also has Greek > > and Cyrillic characters, amongst many others. > > My new code is intended to handle Unicode values over 0xffff, though it > > can't do so at the moment since setfont passes the Unicode value in a > > 16-bit field. This program could be modified easily enough to handle > > general Unicode values. > > The code isn't currently in a state to publish as a patch, but I could > > bring it into such a state reasonably soon if there is any interest in > > it. > Wow, awesome! > I always thought the 256/512 glyphs was a hardware limitation, does this > only work with a framebuffer? Yes, this is for the framebuffer only. The hardware limitation dates from the 1980s. I don't know how many people still use this sort of hardware, but it surely can't be all that many, apart from displaying boot messages before the framebuffer kicks in. > I stopped using the bare console, so my interest in this is purely > historical, but I'm glad someone out there is still doing this kind of > stuff. Thanks! My view of the console is that it's a speedboat, specially adapted for text work. Doing that work in X Windows is like a speedboat encrusted with barnacles. Obviously other people see it differently. > Viorel -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
