XTerm to support multibyte encodings

[Tomohiro KUBOTA <tkubota@riken.go.jp>]

Hi,

Though this is not Debian-specific topic, I think this list is
a best way to let i18n-interested people from various countries
(especially Chinese, Korean, Taiwan, and Thai people) know about
this project.  (Of course, this story affects i18n of Debian in
future.)

I have been working on internationalization of XFree86 XTerm for
more than one year.  Here, internationalization means that XTerm
will be sensible to the current LC_CTYPE locale and uses proper
encoding.  The encoding includes ISO-8859-{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,
11,13,14,15,16}, EUC-{CN,JP,KR}, Big5, KOI8-R, CP1251, and UTF-8.
(TIS-620 is same as ISO-8859-11 and GB is same as EUC-CN).

Though simple 8bit encodings are also supported by current XTerm
by changing fonts, east Asian encodings and Thai encoding will
be first enabled by this project.  For example,

  LANG=de_DE@euro xterm       -> ISO-8859-15 encoding
  LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R xterm     -> KOI8-R encoding
  LANG=zh_TW.Big5 xterm       -> Big5 encoding (of course with
                                 fullwidth character support)
  LANG=th_TH xterm            -> TIS-620 encoding (of course with
                                 combining character support)

The imprementation of i18n XTerm depends on "luit", an encoding
converter which is available in XFree86 4.2.  However, because
of a tiny bug, "luit" could not be used.  Thus I could not promote
the project.

However, the bug has been fixed in this month in the CVS version.
This is why I restarted the project.

I posted a patch to i18n@xfree86.org mailing list.


    http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/i18n/2002-June/003254.html


Detailed information on this project is available at:


    http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/xterm.html


Please test it and post comments.  Also, please let i18n-interested
people in your countries know about this project.

(If possible, please use i18n@xfree86.org mailing list for comments.)

---
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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