Subject: Re: New snapshot of raster/Unicode console driver available
To: Noriyuki Soda <soda@sra.co.jp>
From: Bang Jun-Young <bjy@mogua.org>
List: tech-kern
Date: 02/15/2001 02:30:30
Noriyuki Soda wrote:
> 
> > - Japanese and Korean raw bitmap fonts and wsfonts are included.
> 
> Mm, the font is not really usable for Japanese.
> (As I said previously, Kana-only font is never be useful for Japanese)

I have a JIS Kanji bitmap font convertedd from X11 BDF font but hasn't 
released it yet, because it would be almost useless without ISO-2022-JP
encoding support built into wscons. Please wait for a while until it's 
completed. :) 

> 
> > - wsfontload(8) has been slightly modified to handle double byte fonts
> >   properly. wscons.conf(5) also has been modified. See included sources
> >   for details.
> 
> It seems using own font format for big character set like Hangul or
> Hanji is not really suitable. Could you look at World21 source to
> use X11 font format?

IMHO, X11 BDF font format is not suitable for fixed-size character cell
console. Why do we spend a lot of memory for a lot of unnecessary 
FONTBOUNDINGBOX, SWIDTH, DWIDTH, BBX, etc., when we can put even more 
glyphs in it if we use bitmap format instead?

> 
> > > can I use this wscons driver with ISO8859-2 fonts? How can I do it?
> >
> > For now you can't. Instead, how about using UTF-8 encoded Latin font
> > currently supported? I'm working on 'switchable encoding' to support some
> > other encodings other than UTF-8, including ISO-8859, ISO-2022, EUC, etc.
> 
> This code should be shared with kernel iconv interface for filesystem
> modules. I'm currently working to implement such module and will
> send you patch to wscons.

Jun-Young

--
Bang Jun-Young <bjy@mogua.org>