Unicode-based FreeBSD

[Tz-Huan Huang]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Alexander Churanov
<alexanderchuranov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/8/28 Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de>
>>
>> Right now, a Chinese sysadmin cannot simply go to a FreeBSD
>> console, run mutt and read mails from his co-workers that
>> contain Chinese characters.  This *does* work fine with
>> Linux.  This is clearly an area where FreeBSD is lacking.
>
> Tz-Huan,
> Could you comment on this? Does Linux really display and render all Chinese
> glyphs corectly? Do they have video card compatibility issues? How about
> top-to-bottom rendering? Is it actually used or useful in China and Taiwan?

Hi,

As far as I known Linux's console really support Chinese by change the
display to graphics mode through framebuffer[1]. It should be no video
card compatibility issue if the video card supports VESA well (most cards
support it well I think). How much Chinese glyphs it can render depends on
the coverage of the bitmap fonts, so it should be possible to render all
glyphs if the fonts are available.

However, I have never used this feature in Linux. All linux systems I manage
have either X (desktop) or just text-mode console (server) like FreeBSD.
So I don't think this feature is very useful for me. The debian installer use
this feature to support Chinese and other language interfaces, it might be
useful for a newbie to install an unfamiliar OS. Besides that, there are less
benefits to support this I think.

IMHO your schedules looks fine to me. :-)

Tz-Huan

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_framebuffer