On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 10:15:55AM -0500, Ruibiao Qiu wrote:
> 
> For example, a wide character of width 2 with a value of 0x9ABC would 
> occupy two storage cells, one with a character value of 0x9A and the other 
> with 0xBC.  In addition, the attribute of the first half-character 
> indicates that it is the beginning of a wide character, and the second be 
> the end.
> 

OK, you are a bit confused as to what a wide character is, I must
confess that this had be rather muddled myself for quite a while.  A
wide character is a 32bit quantity (X/Open says it is integer storage
size), every cell in the display must be able to hold a character this
size along with any non-spacing characters associated with it.  Just
to confuse people there is a provision for characters that can occupy
two display cells - I believe that this capability is for some "Far
Eastern" languages where a glyph cannot fit in a single cell.

You must let go of the idea that all characters are constrained to
8bits only - this is not the case with wide character support.

-- 
Brett Lymn