Re: console plans

[Adam Olsen]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 09:14:05PM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> THAT makes me thinking!  I am running out of time, but I just had this hell
> of an idea:  If we would use UTF-8 throughout, we would end up with the vga
> backend receiving UTF-8 characters.  Now it can do one of two things: The
> boring way to handle this is to require a list of 256 characters that it
> should be able to display (for the lazy, this would just be one of the
> standard encodings like latin1).  The interesting way is to prescan as much
> characters as available, and, taking all the characters into account that
> are visible on the screen at that moment, it could try to find "empty slots"
> in the loaded font that it could load with the glyphs for the characters
> that are to be displayed.  In other words, the 256 glyphs vga font would be
> used as a cache for a full blown unicode console font.  You could only
> display as much distinct characters at a time, and in some cases it would be
> performing badly, but in most usage patterns it should work very well,
> certainly good enough for a two-language setup like german-greek, or so.
> Most of the font slots are barely used (if you doubt that, cat a binary
> file for a change) in the western world.

I think this'd be cool, but the failure (when there's more than 256
characters displayed) would be just too wierd.

...

Would it be possible to do a hybrid text/graphical mode, where most
characters are drawn using the vga fonts, but any extra characters are
drawn manually?  Or is that what you meant?

> 
> Call me crazy, but I really like my text mode.  It would not be too hard
> to implement.  And I think it would be plain cool ;)

I like text mode too.  I've got great plans for it. :)


-- 
Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus