On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 04:17:54AM -0800, rajeev joseph sebastian wrote: > Hello Rich Felker, > > It is impossible to fit Malayalam "glyphs" into a given width class, > if you want even barely aesthetic text. This is because a given > sequence of Unicode characters may map into somewhat different > conjunct styles depending on the font: either proper top to bottom > (subjoining), or left to right (adjoining) or something in between > as well :)
Yes, I'm aware of the aesthetic considerations but between the choice of seeing nothing at all and seeing something with excessive spacing (still correctly subjoining, but with extra width/spacing to make up for the second character not using horizontal space), wouldn't the latter be preferable? I don't claim it will be pretty but I believe one can put together something which at least avoids being hideously ugly. I also don't mean to insult your script by presenting it in an ugly way (even having "i" and "m" the same width is ugly although much less severely so), but a terminal and the apps that can be run on it are quite useful IMO and it seems a shame for many people to be unable to use them on account of language. BTW the situation for Kannada seems much less severe... do you know enough about the script to confirm this? Thanks for the comments. Rich P.S. There's also the possibility of treating syllable clusters as the fundamental unit of display and requiring a context-sensative function rather than wcwidth to measure width; however from my experience getting application maintainers just to fix their handling of nonspacing characters is difficult enough without asking them to add script-specific processing. Also the curses library (which is a bad library anyway but many apps use it) doesn't support this model. :( IMO the best long-term solution is to support both, with a terminal escape to switch the terminal between "dumb" wcwidth-based spacing for compatibility with apps that are not specifically Indic-script aware, and "smart" context-sensitive spacing. -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
