About codepage handling: no need to do any font design work, nor any other complicated stuff. Multi-lang support existed in DOS for decades. FreeDOS comes with a set of fonts already (technically: codepage files), that can be loaded via MODE.
Ideally, if a multi-language installer should be considered, it would boil down to: 1. ask the user what language he wants right at start 2. set LANG approprietly 3. execute a few commands, example for PL: SET LANG=PL KEYB pl,991,C:\FREEDOS\BIN\KEYBOARD.SYS DISPLAY CON=(EGA,437,1) MODE CON CP PREPARE=((991) C:\FREEDOS\CPI\EGA10.CPX) MODE CON CP SELECT=991 And then any possible national characters can be used. These lines should ideally land in the newly-created autoexec.bat, if things would want to be consistent. Note, that without codepage change, even the more 'latin' languages will end up wrong, for example french will be misrepresented, and some of the glyphs will appear as garbage on the screen, since the "native" CP437 does not cover all necessary French signs - same goes for Spanish, Portuguese, and probably other languages as well. Mateusz On 23/12/2015 14:40, Jerome E. Shidel Jr. wrote: > >> On Dec 23, 2015, at 7:58 AM, Mateusz Viste <mate...@viste.fr> wrote: >> >> On 23/12/2015 13:38, Jerome E. Shidel Jr. wrote: >>>> Japanese - Nobody. >>>> Russian - Nobody. >>>> Chinese - Nobody. >>> >>> I thought there was a standard and completely acceptable practice >>> for representing these languages using the standard Western DOS >>> Latin based font that was put into place at the dawn of the PC age. >> >> I don't know about asian languages, but for russian it would be a heresy >> to do so. Yes, there exists an informal "latin" equivalent way to write >> russian, but it was never intended to be used by Russian users, it's >> rather for western people to be able to vocalize (*very* approximately) >> russian words and phrases. > > You are probably correct with regards to Russian translation. > > As for the Asian languages, I don’t know either. I thought that the latin > based representation of their written languages came about do due > the two main issues. The limited character set capabilities of the Operating > Systems and writing directions of the written languages. So, more or less, > I came down to: Ok, you want to use computers too. Make your language > work with the hardware. > > Assuming, that my poor knowledge of computer history is even remotely > accurate, I don’t know if is still acceptable to represent the Asian languages > using the DOS Latin font. Or, if it is considered offensive to translate their > languages that way in modern times. > >> >> As for actual russian users, there is CP866, and that's what shall be >> used for DOS text interfaces. > > So, Russian is probably out. Assuming that it is possible to do some code > page swapping on a running system, I don’t think Jim would want the additional > complexity added to FDI. > > Using the font tools I built for PGME and it’s Font Designer., it wouldn’t be > very difficult to change the current DOS font. The tools already exist. This > also assumes that the language could be represented accurately in a 8x?? > size font and someone would create the font and translations. But again, I > don’t think Jim would want the extra complexity. > >> >> Mateusz ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
