Re: Pango in Gnome-terminal, zvt Terminal widget

[Steve Underwood <steveu coppice org>]

Ralph Giles wrote:

> Can one come at it from the other direction? How feasible is it to
> design a charcell font for some of these scripts? I imagine ligituring
> would mess with the one-or-two-character-per-cell rule, so one would need
> to standardize, but it should be possible doing no more damage to the
> typography that it does in roman script. We're all just used to it.

Everywhere I have been so far I have found dumb terminals working in either a
font all of one size, or a combination of two related sizes (e.g. single
width Latin mixed with double width Chinese). I saw a number of
ISCII dumb(ish) terminals in India which worked this way, supporting multiple
Indian languages. Someone told me there are variations of how these work,
though. There is a code in India called ISCLAP, which was developed for
paging, and codes precomposed cells, instead of the phonetic elements. For
various error tolerance reasons, having 5000 precomposed cells in better than
a small set of phonetic symbols. There is a similar code for Thai paging. I
was told that some dumb terminals use a similar code, but I never followed up
on this.

Regards,
Steve