Subject: Re: Loading and using fonts (Re: Polish keyboard support)
To: None <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Valeriy E. Ushakov <uwe@ptc.spbu.ru>
List: current-users
Date: 09/03/2001 04:06:07
On Sun, Sep 02, 2001 at 21:38:14 +0200, Jaromír Dolecek wrote:

> > After you wsfontload(1) the font, use a sipmle program to make the
> > wscons use it.   E.g.:
> > 
> >     $ wsfontload koi8.816
> >     $ wsusefont koi8.816
> 
> Hum, and where you get this koi8.816? I'd be really glad
> to have czech (iso-8859-2) encoding support in console, but
> so far have not succeed in finding anything usable. Can
> I use e.g. FreeBSD syscons fonts?

No, I think FreeBSD uses some custom format.  wscons on i386 needs
fonts in the "raw" vga format, so you can grab fonts from Linux which
uses raw vga format too.

I've not done much testing and I haven't familiarized myself with that
code, but some interesting issues are (and I'm just speculating here):

. will line drawing chars work?
. what to do with the 9th pixel problem?

The 9th pixel problem is about "continuity" of line drawing.  I was
told (I'm not familiar with i386 hardware) that vga "knows" which
character codes are line drawign characters and when you display one,
vga will automagically duplicates the 8th column of pixels in the 9th
column.  Fonts are 8 pixel wide, but the character grid is 9 pixels
wide, so with this trick line drawing chars can form uninterrupted
lines.  E.g.

	    9th column gap
            |
            V
    12345678.12345678
    .................
    ....+---.--------
    ....|............

	    9th column interpolated
            |
            V
    12345678.12345678
    .................
    ....+------------
    ....|............

E.g. on FreeBSD people use koi8-r as Russian charset, but they use
cp866 fonts plus a screen map that does the transcoding from koi8-r to
cp866 on output.  cp866 is a DOS code page for Russian and and it has
line drawing chars in the same places cp437 has them, thus the 9th
column magic does the right thing for cp866 font.

SY, Uwe
-- 
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