Re: Does plain pc console support UNICODE?

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

On 04.10.2012 19:09, Andrey Borzenkov wrote:

> I have default language Russian. When testing patch I switched from
> gfxterm to plain console and got '????' instead of grub messages. Is it
> supposed to work at all? If not, does it make sense to temporary reset
> language when we switch to terminal that is known to not support
> UNICODE?
> 

Normal BIOS console supports only CP437. The fix for this would go through:
1) Possible use of vga_text instead of BIOS services and enhance it with
font-loading code to dynamically load characters we need. But this is
already more than just a simple console and requires to load e.g.
unifont. Currently BIOS services and vga_text are used for their
simplicity and compactness. Perhaps vga_text would need to be split to
vga_text and vga_text_font the latter being a separate module and
vga_text calling vga_text_font only if it's loaded.
2) Another possibility is to translate the unrepresentable characters to
their nearest ASCII equivalent. The problem is that this is somewhat
language-dependent. E.g. a German-speaking person would replace ö with
oe but a Finnish would probably just drop the diaresis.

> -andrey
> 
> 
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-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko

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