Re: quotation marks [was Re: TUTORIAL.de updated]

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

On 21/01/12 12:52, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii<eliz@gnu.org>  writes:
>
>>> Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:12:38 +0000
>>> Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, ulm@gentoo.org, drew.adams@oracle.com,
>>>    emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>> From: Alan Mackenzie<acm@muc.de>
>>>
>>> I have an ordinary Linux tty, currently running a Latin-1 character set.
>>
>> Is it possible to run it with the UTF-8 character set?  AFAIU, this
>> will solve all your problems, while still being compatible with Latin-1.
>
> A console font cannot contain more than 512 characters.
>
> Andreas.

To expand a little, as, while that's true, that doesn't mean there's
no way to do it on an X-less system:

True text-mode (i.e. PC VGA gfx card) linux kernel VTs inherit that 
hardware limitation (256 glyphs with 16 colors or 512 glyphs with 8 
colors) [1] that the kernel can do relatively little about. You can work 
in unicode (see console-tools docs) ...but you can only set up a font 
showing a small subset of glyphs at a time.  The kernel VTs when on a 
framebuffer have some fairly similar limits IIRC, despite there not 
being a hardware reason in that case (lack of demand, compat, shared 
code, and keeping things simple spring to mind as possible non-hardware 
reasons, of course).

... However, there is nowadays a way around the limitation (presumably 
further reducing demand for any more advanced kernel support):

Use the userspace “fbterm” [2][3] terminal emulator instead of the linux 
kernel's more limited built-in. It is essentially a unicode-capable 
terminal emulator like those commonplace on X11 - but one that targets 
the framebuffer (and also now vesa modesetting, like (or perhaps using) 
old libsvga) rather than X11.

Though I currently use X11, so have little reason to use fbterm 
normally, I've just fairly successfully viewed the Hello file (and some 
curly quotes) in an emacs running under

“fbterm -n "DejaVu Sans Mono" -s 32 --vesa-mode=374“


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA_compatible_text_mode#Fonts
[2] http://code.google.com/p/fbterm/
[3] http://packages.debian.org/sid/fbterm