Re: Bug#215647: [patch] xterm 4.3.0-0pre1v3 i18n
Hi,
From: barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)
Subject: Re: Bug#215647: [patch] xterm 4.3.0-0pre1v3 i18n
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 08:03:47 +0200
> Please describe a simple scenario where changing default fonts is
> helpful. I do not understand why you discussed those UTF-8 issues,
> they does not seem related to the problems you want to solve.
Ok. You know, recent xterm supports UTF-8 mode besides conventional
8bit mode. XFree86 4.3 xterm is more improved so that it can support
various encodings including ISO-8859-*, KOI8-*, EUC-*, and so on.
In that mode (I call "locale mode" now), xterm checks the current
locale and choose proper encoding automatically. For example, it
can display Euro when you invoke xterm in ISO-8859-15 locales, it
can display Cyrillics in KOI8-R locales, Japanese in EUC-JP locales,
Thai with combining characters in TIS-620 locales, and so on.
On the other hand, in conventional 8bit mode, xterm doesn't care about
encodings at all and it just uses given font. This is why non-ISO-
8859-1 people have to configure their font setting for xterm even
if they set LANG variable.
My intension is to make the locale mode default.
Internally, locale mode is implemented using the UTF-8 mode and an
automatically-invoked wrapper utility "luit". Because of this, the
locale mode always uses Unicode font. This is why my patch includes
Unicode font settings.
Again, my intension is to make the locale mode default, and the
Unicode font setting is mere a means for that.
A side effect of my patch is that non-iso-8859-1 people don't need
to install xfonts-*-transcoded packages for xterm, because xterm will
always use *-iso10646-1 fonts which are available in non-"transcoded"
versions of packages.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
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