Re: Pango in Gnome-terminal, zvt Terminal widget

[Robert Brady <robert suse co uk>]

Cc:ed to linux-utf8 becuase it is of interest...

For reference, the original post -
<http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-i18n-list/2000-October/msg00020.html>

On 19 Oct 2000, Owen Taylor wrote:

> In general, I'd say that using Pango in a terminal widget is a
> difficult thing to do.

Agreed. It will be not only highly complex, if not impossible, but it
won't be much use, as most complex-text languages need proportional fonts
to look sensible. And if you're using fractional character cells, it's not
a terminal any more.

>  - Much work has been done to make xterm handle utf-8 and
>    double width characters. (But no bidi support)

This is no longer entirely accurate, I have mostly-working bidi and arabic
shaping support for xterm. (check linux-utf8 list archives for patch)

Do I plan to do Devanagari shaping? Sure, I'd like to, but I just don't
see any way of doing this in a terminal...

Better to make sure the Indic shaping works in pango normally than to get
crazy ideas about using it in terminals.

> The same sort of things could be done for gnome-terminal - in fact
> there is some simple UTF-8 code in the CVS version, and a patch for
> double-width characters does exist.

I didn't know that, do you have a URL for that patch?

> My attempts to fix bugs in the zvt widget have not met with much
> success in general, and I'd be worried about adding new features
> without doing a lot of rewriting of at least the display engine, and
> perhaps some of the escape-sequence parsing as well.

At some point, I was hoping to bring zvt up to scratch wrt Unicode
rendering, but I think it's best to first get a consensus about how
Unicode should work in terminals, and perhaps then use xterm as
a "reference implementation".

-- 
Robert