[Groff] Re: backspace and Unicode in terminals

[xerces8]

You mean the "erase" character, right ?

-----Original Message-----
From: Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Cc: address@hidden
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 09:24:23 +0100 (CET)
Subject: backspace and Unicode in terminals

> 
> I'm going to improve grotty, the TTY backend of groff, so that it can
> handle zero-width and double-width characters, as needed for proper
> Unicode support.
> 
> Doing so I wonder how is the backspace character (U+0008, \b) handled
> in TTYs?  Is there any documentation for it?
> 
> Most importantly: If I have a wide character at position p which is
> followed by `\b' (at position p+2), is the final position p again?
> With other words, is the width of `\b' dependent on the width of the
> previous character?  What happens if I have a sequence of `\b'
> characters?  I'm thinking especially of the interaction at the
> beginning of a new line.  Is there a distinction between a user who
> presses the `backspace' key, and a `\b' character in the data stream?
> 
> 
>     Werner
> 
> --
> Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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