From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755491Ab0E0Gxl (ORCPT ); Thu, 27 May 2010 02:53:41 -0400 Received: from hera.kernel.org ([140.211.167.34]:52485 "EHLO hera.kernel.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753584Ab0E0Gxj (ORCPT ); Thu, 27 May 2010 02:53:39 -0400 Message-ID: <4BFE1695.5000206@kernel.org> Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 08:52:05 +0200 From: Tejun Heo User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Thunderbird/3.0.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Frank Pan CC: Alan Cox , Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi , Kay Sievers , Andrew Morton , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Catalin Marinas , Daniel Mack , Christoph Lameter , Jiri Slaby , Jochen Hein , Johannes Weiner , Dave Airlie , Pekka Enberg , Geert Uytterhoeven , LKML Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] Enlarge the storage of chars in virtual terminal References: <20100526151152.28deaa6c@linux.intel.com> In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Version: 1.0.1 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Greylist: Sender IP whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-4.2.3 (hera.kernel.org [127.0.0.1]); Thu, 27 May 2010 06:52:09 +0000 (UTC) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hello, On 05/27/2010 08:00 AM, Frank Pan wrote: >> This has been suggested a couple of times but unfortunately it's not >> enough to use bigger fonts. Rendering many non western languages is far >> far more complex. In addition the text mode vt driver is limited to 512 >> symbols by the hardware. > > Why is it complex? IMHO Rendering non-western languages is nothing more than > rendering 2 ASCII chars. That's only true for CJK. There are other scripts which are more difficult to render properly. e.g. In mixed English Arabic text, English needs to be rendered left-to-right as usual while Arabic needs to be rendered right-to-left. Indic rendering is also known to be very tricky. Even on full desktop environment, only Gnome + Pango and Visat/7 get everything right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AEnabling_complex_text_support_for_Indic_scripts And then, if you think about multilingual terminal, output is only one half of the story. You gotta be able to input something too and in many scripts, input handling needs to interact constantly with rendering, which means that the kernel will also need to supply input framework, at which point I start to wonder whether the whole thing is just too complicated. Why do we need a separate in-kernel implementation of unicode rendering and multilingual input system at all? What's the use case other than "I just want to use console"? Thanks. -- tejun