Subject: Re: Dog Food.
From: Oliver Doepner (oldo@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE)
Date: Thu Mar 23 2000 - 04:17:23 CST
On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> The "Insert Symbol" dialog gives you the choice of all the fonts
> with 256 characters available on the Unix build. You choose a font, then
> choose a character. It implicitly assumes that each character is 8 bits
> wide. The dialog remembers the font and character you chose between
> invocations and the default font and character presented when you ask for
> "Insert Symbol" was the one you last chose.
ASCII is compliant with UTF8 in the sense that every ASCII-encoded file is
a valid UTF8 file (due to the design of UTF8 which is a stateless variable
length encoding for unicode basic linaer plane 1).
There is a great fixed size X11 font (bdf-format) for unicode available:
The GNU unifont (http://cyborra.com/unifont) which is easy to install:
Download the unifont.bdf and a nice hex2bdf-tool packed in
(unifont_19990430.orig.tar.gz) from:
http://www.us.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/unifont.html
("unstable" is not the right word, "growing" would have hit the point..)
and follow the instructions that Roman Czyborra gives on his
unifont-pages. If there occur problems installing the font you might want
to refer to:
http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/fonts/X-Window-System-fonts.html
Unifont covers some 10.000 symbols of the current unicode 2.0/3.0 charts
and is easy to extend (!)
> I've never tried to work out how utf8 maps to 16 bit unicode [..]
An excellent resource for unicode matters is Martin Kuhn's "Unicode FAQ":
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
> [..] I guess I have to add unicode to the
> list of things I have to learn. Hacking on Abiword has been a very
> educational experience. It gives me more sympathy to all the students I
> lecture Physics to!
There is a great GPLed tool to explore the niceties of unicode: Yudit
(unicode editor/editress :-) ) by With support for TrueTypeFonts for
display and printing, native GNU unifont support and input methods
(keyboard mappings) for your favorite script (Straight, Unicode,
Chinese-CJ, Greek, Russian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Kana, Danish, Dutch,
German, Mnemonic, Polish, SGML, Cyrillic, Hangul, Vietnamese, Ethiopic,
Hebrew, Arabic, French, Czech)
There are nice screensots of Yudit at http://czyborra.com/yudit/.
Checkout yudit among other great editor/word processor projects at:
http://www.icewalk.com/softlib/cat/cat_00004.html
The cyberbit bitsteam TTF can be obtained via:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/babble/download/download.html
Cheers :-)
Oli
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