Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 27 May 2010 08:52:05 +0200 | From | Tejun Heo <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 0/2] Enlarge the storage of chars in virtual terminal |
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Hello,
On 05/27/2010 08:00 AM, Frank Pan wrote: >> This has been suggested a couple of times but unfortunately it's not >> enough to use bigger fonts. Rendering many non western languages is far >> far more complex. In addition the text mode vt driver is limited to 512 >> symbols by the hardware. > > Why is it complex? IMHO Rendering non-western languages is nothing more than > rendering 2 ASCII chars.
That's only true for CJK. There are other scripts which are more difficult to render properly. e.g. In mixed English Arabic text, English needs to be rendered left-to-right as usual while Arabic needs to be rendered right-to-left. Indic rendering is also known to be very tricky. Even on full desktop environment, only Gnome + Pango and Visat/7 get everything right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AEnabling_complex_text_support_for_Indic_scripts
And then, if you think about multilingual terminal, output is only one half of the story. You gotta be able to input something too and in many scripts, input handling needs to interact constantly with rendering, which means that the kernel will also need to supply input framework, at which point I start to wonder whether the whole thing is just too complicated.
Why do we need a separate in-kernel implementation of unicode rendering and multilingual input system at all? What's the use case other than "I just want to use console"?
Thanks.
-- tejun
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