[SlugLUG] unicode text in terminals

[Peter Belew]

That's good to know - that Indic scripts can be handled in some GUI
apps (though unfortunately the terminal problems still exist. I once
was trying to write some code for Windows 3.x for a company up in
Washington State, to handle input of various Indic scripts. The
problem I encountered was making an input method that works while
typing input in the order consonant+vowel - the modifiers that
indicate a vowel often appear before the basic syllable glyph, so the
terminal has to backspace over the basic glyph and replace it with 2
glyphs. And backspacing has to perform properly.

Maybe someone has come up with an alternate term program?

- Peter

On 3/2/07, Suraj N. Kurapati <skurapat at ucsc.edu> wrote:
> Erich Blume wrote:
> > Secondly, what is a good console font to use that not only supports UTF-8,
> > but actually employs a lot of it? I mean, not just sygils and accents, but a
> > LOT of stuff such as, er, Japanese (I can never keep the names of the
> > different character sets straight), and Arabic (same deal). I never use
> > these, of course, but I'd like to at least have the *option*.
>
> I use the default "monospace" font with gnome-terminal in Ubuntu and
> the Unicode languages automagically appear (thanks to Pango or
> FontConfig or ...?) when necessary.
>
> AFAIK gnome-terminal uses Pango without support for more complex
> languages (Indian scripts, Thai, etc.) for speed reasons. Apart from
> these, the CJK and European languages are rendered correctly in
> their full glory.
>
> Mozilla does this too (using Pango halfheartedly) to provide a more
> responsive experience for non-Indic and non-Thai users (why slow
> down the browser by processing fonts for languages you'll never read
> anyway?). However, unlike gnome-terminal, Mozilla provides a
> mechanism (MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO environment variable) by which we can
> enable the full use of pango and thereby read our scripts correctly
> on the Web.
>
> If you need to work with Indian scripts, like I do, then you're
> stuck with adapting to the broken rendering in gnome-terminal or
> using a GTK+2 file manager (rox, nautilus, firefox, etc.) to have
> the languages rendered correctly.
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