Unicode-based FreeBSD

[Konrad Jankowski]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Alexander Churanov
<alexanderchuranov at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sample schedule:
>
> 1) Implement support for UTF-8 in syscons with mapping UTF-8 to 256
> characters for rendering. The rest of characters will not be displayed
> correctly, however proper backspacing, character counts and other things
> like that will work. This is clearly better than what we have now.
>
> 2) Proceed with design discussion and cost estimation for implementing
> rendering more than 256 glyphs at a time. This will only affect rendering.
>
Sound reasonable. Moving is small steps will assure get at least
something working.
I support the initial idea - i'd like to 'cat' UTF8 encoded Polish
files in the console. And this can easily accommodate most European
languages. But there will need to be a secondary switching mechanism
for selecting which part of the Unicode is being mapped at the time.
When this is ready, there will need to be additional mapping switch
implemented. That is the one that maps all of the Unicode at once, by
switching to the graphics mode.
We also get a bonus - for people that use languages like Polish, they
can stay in text mode and not loose speed, which is Inherent with
VESA.