Re: console plans

[Niels Möller]

Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de> writes:

> Esp with the input below, I feel much better about Unicode now (although
> I would not like to support the whole lot of it right from the
> start, esp the compose characters A + ["] = Ä and stuff like that).

Yes, unicode is a lot more complex than one might think before getting
into the details. In particular combining characters and normalization
issues.

For the input part, the complexity hits whatever component it is that
converts unicode or utf8 to a local charset like latin1 (and given the
current level of support for utf8 in tools like emacs and TeX, I don't
think eightbit charsets will be abandoned very soon).

For output, it hits the component that converts unicode/utf8 to
glyphs or glyph indices.

It would probably simplyfy things if you could get away with requiring
a normalized encoding with precomposed characters, such that every
glyph you'd want to display corresponds to a single unicode value. I
can't say if that's possible, though, I have too little experience
with non-european scripts.

If the complexity can be managed, using unicode seems like the right
way to go. A simpler alternative might be X keysyms, they ought to
cover all characters available on existing keyboards (although I'm not
sure about if the set of codes is rich enough also for output. I also
haven't looked at all into X novelties like xkb).

Regards,
/Niels