Re: console plans

[Niklas Höglund]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 08:53:24PM +0000, Adam Olsen wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 09:14:05PM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > [...] The interesting way is to prescan as much
> > characters as available, and, taking all the characters into account that
> > are visible on the screen at that moment, it could try to find "empty slots"
> > in the loaded font that it could load with the glyphs for the characters
> > that are to be displayed.  In other words, the 256 glyphs vga font would be
> > used as a cache for a full blown unicode console font.  You could only
> > display as much distinct characters at a time, and in some cases it would be
> > performing badly, but in most usage patterns it should work very well,
> > certainly good enough for a two-language setup like german-greek, or so.
> > Most of the font slots are barely used (if you doubt that, cat a binary
> > file for a change) in the western world.

I think there is a program for the Linux console that does this. I
remember seing this a while ago. I did a quick search in apt-cache,
and found dynafont. I'm not sure if this is the program I remember,
though. I couldn't find a lot of documentation.

> I think this'd be cool, but the failure (when there's more than 256
> characters displayed) would be just too wierd.

You'd have to show that box that indicates a glyph isn't available for
those characters that aren't.

The best solution is probably to use a graphical mode.

-- 
                                                Niklas