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Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 11:57:16 +0100
From: Alan Cox <alan@linux.intel.com>
To: Frank Pan <frankpzh@gmail.com>
Cc: Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi <vmlinuz386@yahoo.com.ar>,
       Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>,
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       Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>,
       Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] Enlarge the storage of chars in virtual terminal
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> Why is it complex?

You'd have to take that up with the orthographers and historians

> IMHO Rendering non-western languages is nothing
> more than rendering 2 ASCII chars. The current mainline kernel

It is a lot more. Things like arabic vowel handling for example, or
mixed direction text.

> IMHO A user space application doing such thing is just
> re-implementation of virtual terminal support, without the 512
> limitation. Why does we keeping re-inventing the wheel?

Pango does the job. Pango is the wheel.

Kernel code is unpageable, privileged and unable to doing things
trivially like dynamic font management. It's the wrong place for this
kind of stuff because doing fonts right and especially doing language
rendering right is *hard*.

Alan