Re: Displaying Plane 1 characters on X11

From: Roman Czyborra (czyborra@cs.tu-berlin.de)
Date: Sun Nov 22 1998 - 19:57:49 EST


Dear Asmus:

> ISO 10646-2 will cover ALL planes other than plane 0.

Alright, thank you for shedding light on this!

> I suggest that you instead use a designation
> *-iso10646-1 UCS Plane +00 (Basic Multilingual Plane)
> *-iso10646-2 UCS Plane +01 (Etruscan, Music, etc.)
> *-iso10646-2 UCS Plane +02
> *-iso10646-2 UCS Plane +03
> ...

This is unsuitable for the X11 Logical Font Description because you
would not be able to tell a Plane +01 font from a Plane +02 font if
they both used the key *-iso10646-2.

Markus Kuhn wrote:

> > *-iso10646-01 UCS Plane +01 (Etruscan, Music, etc.)
> > *-iso10646-02 UCS Plane +02
> > *-iso10646-03 UCS Plane +03

> This looks like a very ugly hack to me, and not at all like the
> desirable final solution. Unicode is NOT about replacing a world in
> which we switch between 8-bit fonts by a world in which we switch
> between 16-bit fonts! The real solution is obviously to introduce
> something like a XDrawString32() or better a XDrawString_UTF8() (may be
> in the context of a general mb string support) into Xlib and to add --
> if necessary -- a proper X11 protocol extension (there are
> well-established mechanisms for this).

I agree that 16-bit fonts are a compromise and that X11 could benefit
from a revolution. If you consider that within reach, be my guest.
But don't you think that the 16-bit ditch is a bit too deep?

I was looking for a way to type Etruscan on existing X11 servers
(quite an installed base).

Now I would prefer something even more flexible and uglier and propose
that a CHARSET_ENCODING of "+" followed by hexdigits without leading
zeroes for CHARSET_REGISTRY "ISO10646" specify an offset to each
decimal ENCODING so that I could use "*-iso10646-+10000" for my Plane
+01 font and also have a way to properly label Plan9's Unicode block
fontlets in ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/matty/unicode/libXg.utf.fonts.tar.gz



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