Date: 25 Mar 2000 18:34:19 +0100 From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD Message-ID: <8bitar$2i4f$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <20000320194702.11223.qmail@web3101.mail.yahoo.com>
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MikeM <mike_bsdlists@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Has anyone thought of Unicode support on FreeBSD?
It has crossed my mind...
> I think that it is inevitable that eventually FreeBSD
> will *need* to support unicode if it wants to continue
> as a viable operating system in the future.
Probably. The demand for Unicode support is currently rather limited,
but I expect it to pick up somewhat once it is pervasive under
Linux and applications programmers come to expect its availability.
> This means that it probably will need to be modified from the
> ground up.
Not at all.
> Is there any way of implementing partial support,
> working in stages, untill it is fully supported?
Just that.
I suggest you read these documents:
"UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ" by Markus Kuhn
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
"The Unicode HOWTO" by Bruno Haible
ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/utf8/Unicode-HOWTO.html
"Unicode Fonts and Tools for X11" by Markus Kuhn
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html
These are written for Linux but they are largely applicable to BSD
in general and FreeBSD in particular, too.
The practical relevance of Unicode has taken a huge leap forward
when Thomas Dickey made xterm became capable of displaying UTF-8
encoded Unicode character streams and Markus Kuhn coordinated the
creation of some suitable fonts. This work has been merged into
XFree86 4.0. For those of us still relying on an older release or
actually requiring an even newer version of xterm, I have made
ports available:
http://home.pages.de/~naddy/unix/freebsd/xterm.shar
http://home.pages.de/~naddy/unix/freebsd/ucs-fixed.shar
(Earlier versions of) these have been submitted in PRs #15545 and
#15840, but for some reason they have never been committed.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de
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