Messages in this thread | | | From | (H. Peter Anvin) | Subject | Re: How is 8-bit character support enabled for the TTY driver | Date | 7 Dec 1999 14:09:05 -0800 |
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Followup to: <384D6492.4683238A@timpanogas.com> By author: "Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@timpanogas.com> In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > Whomever owns the TTY drivers, how do you turn the damn thing on to > allow you to display characters above 127? I am using the ncurses lib > for building our nwfs utils with a CWorthy look and feel menuing > interface, along with some management tools, and I cannot get characters > aove 127 to display. If I use the VCS interface, then I can get it to > work properly, but VCS screens cannot be accessed from remote terminals > on other systems. I realize the expanding beyond 7 bits on the terminal > display may not work on some terminals, but who gives a damn? Linux was > a PC operating system, so this should be supported, and I only care > about it working on Linux for the ncurses versions of the tools. There > is also a text based version of the tools that will work on everything, > even 7 bit terminal, but we want to put out some fancier tools for folks > with Linux, DOS, NT, etc. >
Careful! First of all, there are no guarantees that the entire CP437 font is present (after all, it isn't even on many PCs, and the PC font lacks a lot of *useful* characters); second, lots of people spend most of their time in X anyhow.
Anyway, you can use the ncurses interface (recommended), or you can use the escape sequences from /usr/src/linux/Documentation/unicode.txt to switch between Latin-1, VT100, IBM Code Page 437, and "everything else". The last is a huge wart in the console driver IMNSHO; the obvious solution would be to make it ISO 2022 compliant, but unfortunately that's impossible to do in a backwards compatible manner :(
There is also UTF-8 mode, initiated with ESC % G. Then you can issue Unicode UTF-8 sequences for whatever character you dang well please.
-hpa -- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
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