Re: [I18n]Re: mlterm with BiDi support
Hi,
At Thu, 27 Dec 2001 05:28:34 +0200,
Shaul Karl wrote:
> > I'm a native persian speaker, have wrote many parts of fribidi
> > library, and also working on console bidi, as all of you agree,
> > almost all command line tools (like cat, tr, grep, ...), should do
> > nothing about bidi, and on the other side, their output on terminal
> > should be readable, then bidi is necessery on terminal, this also
> > happens for all applications that are subject to gnu translation
> > project, I mean that when I put my persian message files there, I
> > should be able to get right messages in persian.
Thank you very much, Behdad, for your comment as a native Persian
speaker. Yes, I agree with you and Shaul that terminal should be
able to handle BiDi so that developers of application softwares can
be free from studying about BiDi. Otherwise, since a little part of
people in the world need BiDi and most of non-BiDi-needing developers
would not study about BiDi, most part of softwares in the world would
be able to handle BiDi.
This is what we (native Japanese speaker) have explienced for long years.
Japanese need multibyte encoding. However, most of people in the world
don't need multibyte encoding and most of developers in the world didn't
study about multibyte encoding. Thus, we have to modify them to enable
multibyte encoding. East Asian people (including Japanese) need not
only multibyte encodings but also doublewidth character, input method
support, and so on.
Thus, I eager a situation that developers who don't know about i18n
nor foreign languages cannot develop softwares which don't support
East Asian, BiDi, combining characters, and so on.
> > What we have found is to enable the bidi on terminal, ask applications
> > that support bidi, to send a bidi-off escape code to terminal, and do
> > the stuff themselves, for example, libncurses, should support bidi and
> > turn the terminal bidi off on initscr()...
>
> Can you explain what do you mean by `libncurses, should support bidi'?
> Why not having the BiDi stuff centralized at one point (the terminal)
> instead of having it spread across many (ncurses, slang, libraries for
> text only processing)?
I think Behdad says that they sometimes need to use non-BiDi-supported
terminals such as Linux console. For such cases, libraries such as
curses may supply BiDi support, though I don't know this works well
or not.
For my case, Linux console doesn't support Japanese. Thus, I have
lines like:
if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ] ; then
LANG=C
else
LANG=ja_JP.eucJP
fi
in my ~/.bashrc file.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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