Re: Question: How does ncurses store and handle "wide" characters?

[Bill Gray]

On 5/31/21 9:45 AM, Thomas Dickey wrote:

> I haven't found it necessary to show the bit layout, since the header file
> is commented well enough :-)

   The MANUAL.md text Peter cites was automatically extracted
from the PDCursesMod curses.h header.  As you suggest,  the header
file is the logical place to document such things.

> >     By default,  a 64-bit chtype is used [in PDCursesMod] :
>
> ...which doesn't allow for combining-characters :-)

   Au contraire.  Combining characters _are_ handled in PDCursesMod,
though using a scheme very different from the ncurses one :

https://github.com/Bill-Gray/PDCursesMod/blob/master/pdcurses/addch.c#L281

   See,  e.g.,  the next-to-bottom line in the screen shot at

https://www.projectpluto.com/win32a.htm

   I did consider the "array of wchar_t" approach (or more likely,
win_t to get around Microsoft's 16-bit wchar_ts),  and that would
have been straightforward enough in some ways.  But I'd really have
had to rip a lot of code apart to do that in PDCursesMod.

-- Bill