Re: LYNX-DEV From Ethiopia Again:- UTF-8 and Lynx

[Klaus Weide]

On Mon, 18 Nov 1996 address@hidden wrote:

>      Thanks very much to all for the response to my original question.
>      
>      > Check out the DOWNLOADER definitions you can find via the FAQ. Find 
>      > the FAQ from http://lynx.browser.org/
>      > Do get back to us if that doesn't solve your problem.
>      
>      Well, the issue is that we do not have any Internet access from here.  
>      Email goes out throu long distance telephone calls to work.  The 
>      Ethiopian Telecom.  Authority will keep a tight control on Internet 
>      access when they make it avaialalbe -they will be the sole ISP.  No 
>      one knows when we will get it.
>      
>      If the FAQ could be sent to me I would be extremely grateful.

I am not sending it since you probably don't want multiple copies...
so I leave it to the maintainers of those documents.

If you just want to find out about defining DOWNLOADERs, reading the
relevant comments in your lynx.cfg file is a good start.

>      A 
>      second question concerns UTF-8 encoding.  We are experimenting with 
>      Ethiopic script under Linux which supports UTF-8.  But with Lynx many 
>      characters will vanish.  I tried a number of the ISO settings but none 
>      worked.  I think any setting that is "8 Bit Safe" should work with 
>      UTF-8.  Do I need to recompile?  Perhaps the FAQ answers this.

There currently is no support in Lynx for UTF-8, and you cannot expect it
to work.  Even with settings as close as possible to 8 Bit Transparent[*],
Lynx will get confused because it miscalculates the number of characters
on a line, and it will split lines in the middle of a character...

I am currently working on putting some Unicode support into Lynx.  (Yes
I am, second attempt...)  I am also using Linux, so if you can give me
some more details on what you are trying to do, it may help me understand
better what kind of Unicode support is wanted.  Do you have a special
Unicode mapping for the Ethiopic script (like the *.uni files from Linux's
kbd package) that you could send me?  Are you trying to use Linux console,
real terminals, or xterm?  How large are the fonts, and do they include
ASCII? 

   Klaus

  [*]  The closest you can currently come with the distributed Lynx
       is probably pretending you have KOI8-R character set.
       You can also play with the '@' toggle key.

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