[Mlterm-dev-en] mlterm, tibetan, and bitmap fonts?

[Rich F. <da...@ae...>]

hi. i'm preparing to overhaul my system (a very diy linux-based setup)
in the near future, with one of the big goals being complete migration
from ascii to unicode. i tried mlterm recently on another system and
was very pleased with it, and intend for it to be the primary/only
terminal i use on my new setup. however, i have a few questions before
i begin:

first: my main motivation for wanting a full utf8 environment is
tibetan language support. i want to be able to read and write tibetan
in email (mutt/emacs), irc/aim (irssi), etc.

tibetan makes heavy use of combining characters -- up to 5 characters
in one cell in ordinary colloquial words. i know that mlterm has
support for combining characters (unlike the other useless "unicode"
terminals i've found), but my understanding is that it overlays
several glyphs to make the combined glyph. this is certainly usable,
but only at rather large font sizes -- large enough that i wouldn't
have very many columns on the screen.

what i'd like is to use a bitmap font with all possible stacks
precombined and edited for readability. i've already played around
with this quite a bit and made a fully readable tibetan font at 8x24
pixels; however, the information i've found online (*nix/unicode faq,
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html) seems to indicate that
the x font system has no decent way of supporting precombined bitmap
glyphs when there is no precombined unicode character number.

so my first question is: is there a way to do this already? or a sane
way to implement it without introducing hacks that are way too evil?
i'm willing to do really ugly hacks to support it if necessary (like
ignoring the x font system and loading the bitmap glyphs directly in
mlterm as a pixmap) but i'd be a lot more interested in doing it right
if there's a sane way to do it instead, so that it could get included
in the official mlterm source.

my second question is off-topic, but maybe someone here can answer: is
screen's utf8 support usable? (including combining characters?) a
quick rtfs seemed to indicate so but i don't have an environment for
testing it at present. i'm quite addicted to screen, so if its utf8
support is broken i need to do something about that first...

sorry for the long email. let me know if you have any ideas. (i'm
subscribed to the list so no need to cc me)

rich