Re: Consolechars Doubt

[James S. <jsi...@ac...>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000 20:05:17 +0200
From: Andries Brouwer <ae...@ve...>
To: Ratheesh KrishnaVadhyar <ra...@pe...>
Cc: lin...@vg...
Subject: Re: Consolechars Doubt

On Fri, Jun 16, 2000 at 08:09:34PM +0530, Ratheesh KrishnaVadhyar wrote:

> 	I am a student trying to develop a PSF file for supporting a
> Regional language. For some characters, I need to have multiple glyphs,
> as console doesnt support variable width fonts. We can have a keymap to do
> this , but this actually generates multiple ASCII values and hence wont be
> compatible with other existing ttf/bdf fonts available for X, where there
> is only one ASCII code for a character. 
> 
> 	Can we have a 1 to many mapping from ASCII values to
> glyphs in the PSF/ACM file ? (ie. , can we have multiple glyphs displayed
> for same key pressed?) If this support is not present , what are the
> changes/ configurations that we need to do to support this? 

consolechars is from the console-tools package, a fork of the kbd
package that I know very little about.

The kbd package has some added support for something that almost
sounds like the opposite you are asking: a single font position
described by a sequence of Unicode symbols.
(I needed that last year for Tibetan.)

So, answering your question:
(i) No, as far as I know there is no direct support that will let
the kernel display a sequence of glyphs for a single symbol.
(ii) It would be very easy to extend the psf2 format to allow
this. But a kernel patch would be required.
If you want to discuss this, mail ae...@cw.... I can make the kernel
patch (maybe have it already) and add a version to the psf2 format
so that the kbd utilities will support this. Tell me about the language,
the alphabet, what you use under X and what you want to use on the
console.
(iii) For many somewhat more complicated languages, where the shape
of the representation for a letter depends on the context,
one can get 95% solutions with some kernel kludges, but in the end
a user-space solution with a program reading a pseudo-tty and handling
the screen is the only real good solution.

Andries

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