Hi David, the DOS way of supporting charsets with more than 256 different characters ws called DBCS and used only in Asian / CJK countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBCS This is not exactly UTF-8. Normally, DOS users configure their system to use one (or switch between a few) 256 character code pages (character sets). Of course software for DOS is free to process more complex data internally, but DOS does not, generally speaking. You could make your software interpret UTF-8 internally and convert to and from the currently active codepage using some kind of Unicode look up tables. Displaying 1000s of different characters simultaneously only works with graphics anyway, but you can at least preserve UTF-8 and display the parts which can be displayed in the current charset. It would be interesting to test and implement various DBCS things with FreeDOS: On top of that, you could implement I/O libraries which translate between 16-bit DBCS and the parts of Unicode which can be represented as UTF-16, for example, with additional support for converting UTF-8 strings to and from UTF-16 or DBCS. For DOS as operating system kernel itself, Unicode basically does not exist, but all applications for DOS are free to interpret raw data under the assumtion of UTF-8, UTF-16 or other Unicode encodings. For special cases such as long file name support, the corresponding drivers already have special approaches for handling a few Unicode characters beyond ASCII. As said, for display, you will often need graphics anyway and that will often mean that it only works within your application. Regards, Eric > I'm coordinating a bunch of updates to Frotz[1], including the DOS port. > One of the big enhancements is UTF-8 support for input and output. > This would allow effortless support for accented characters and alternate > alphabets. We've tested games written for Spanish (diacritical marks) > and Russian (Cyrillic alphabet). > So far, I've found absolutely nothing on doing UTF-8 IO on DOS. Is this > something that can be done without bogging down an original IBM PC? How > would I go about doing it? > [1] Z-machine interpreter for Infocom games and others. > See https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
