From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Mar 25 10:30:43 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (news-ma.rhein-neckar.de [193.197.90.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 857BB37B65C for ; Sat, 25 Mar 2000 10:30:38 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: from bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (uucp@localhost) by news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with bsmtp id TAA11239 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Sat, 25 Mar 2000 19:30:36 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id SAA84122 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Sat, 25 Mar 2000 18:34:19 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from daemon) From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) Subject: Re: Unicode on FreeBSD Date: 25 Mar 2000 18:34:19 +0100 Message-ID: <8bitar$2i4f$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <20000320194702.11223.qmail@web3101.mail.yahoo.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG MikeM 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message