Re: lynx-dev Emacs + UTF-8 + Lynx

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sun, May 28, 2000 at 08:18:03PM -0500, Klaus Weide wrote:
 
> In an ideal world, UTF-8 capable versions of curses and slang
> would be interface-compatible with previous versions.

yes/no - it's the same interface, but requires a different copy of libncurses
(libncursesw) which accepts 16-bit characters in the functions that manipulate
chtype's rather than 8-bit characters, such as addchstr.

That ability (to accept 16-bit characters) can be easily tested with an ifdef,
and the library itself initializes UTF-8 if that string appears in the locale
variables ($LANG, etc).
 
> > The same scheme
> > could be used to make drivers for other 16-bit character sets.
> 
> What is a 'driver', in this sense?

A piece of code that ncurses refers to via a function pointer that
renders a character cell by sending - in this case - a sequence of
UTF-8.
 
> I haven't looked at your new ncurses code (and it seemed you
> don't really encourage using it, at this point).

yes/no - it's limited to single-plane 16-bit Unicode (I'm told that Unicode can
describe characters that overstrike, or use more than one cell), requires that
you use the functions that manipulate chtype's.  The X/Open spec describes a
lot more functionality, but it'll require a different underlying structure.

the more I learn about this area, the more there is to do...
 
(barring bugs, though, it's usable code).

>    Klaus
> 
> 
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-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://dickey.his.com
ftp://dickey.his.com

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