Hello, Some more thinking aloud on this issue.
On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote: > There are things like a "combining character" (like vowels in Indic > languages) which modify the unicode character that comes before > them to give a _different_ unicode character; the resulting unicode > character is what must actually be displayed. It is inherently difficult for a terminal to do this. The reason is that terminals usually deal with "character at a time" processing. The point is that combining characters appear _later_ in the input stream and modify the display of characters that already came before. Of course, terminals _could_ redraw the display repeatedly as combining characters are input and the character to be displayed is changed (for example see how this is done with yudit). With modern processing speeds and double buffered displays this may not cause too much "flashing". Bharathi has also raised the problem of fixed width fonts leading to ugli-ness. Since proportional width terminal fonts can cause their own set of difficulties (for example if you refer to columns in your curses application), we will probably have to live with some ugliness in terminal displays. There is also the requirement that the original input stream must also be buffered for scroll-back cut and paste capabilities. Regards, Kapil. -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
