Does plain pc console support UNICODE?

Does plain pc console support UNICODE?

[Andrey Borzenkov]

I have default language Russian. When testing patch I switched from
gfxterm to plain console and got '????' instead of grub messages. Is it
supposed to work at all? If not, does it make sense to temporary reset
language when we switch to terminal that is known to not support
UNICODE?

-andrey

Re: Does plain pc console support UNICODE?

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

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On 04.10.2012 19:09, Andrey Borzenkov wrote:

> I have default language Russian. When testing patch I switched from
> gfxterm to plain console and got '????' instead of grub messages. Is it
> supposed to work at all? If not, does it make sense to temporary reset
> language when we switch to terminal that is known to not support
> UNICODE?
> 

Normal BIOS console supports only CP437. The fix for this would go through:
1) Possible use of vga_text instead of BIOS services and enhance it with
font-loading code to dynamically load characters we need. But this is
already more than just a simple console and requires to load e.g.
unifont. Currently BIOS services and vga_text are used for their
simplicity and compactness. Perhaps vga_text would need to be split to
vga_text and vga_text_font the latter being a separate module and
vga_text calling vga_text_font only if it's loaded.
2) Another possibility is to translate the unrepresentable characters to
their nearest ASCII equivalent. The problem is that this is somewhat
language-dependent. E.g. a German-speaking person would replace ö with
oe but a Finnish would probably just drop the diaresis.

> -andrey
> 
> 
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> 



-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko


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