Re: font in open firmware

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Wednesday 24 August 2005 20:30, Marco Gerards wrote:
> Can you please explain why this is important and what you mean?  AFAIK
> the console font on the new world apple is fixed width.  On the
> pegasos a text screen just like the PC is used.

Maybe this is the second time, but I talk about it.

It completely depends on the implementation of a terminal how characters are 
displayed. For example, some are capable of displaying wide characters, while 
others do not support them so display merely dummy characters. Or, some want 
to display the border characters used in the menu interface in a single 
width, while others may want to display them as two-column characters.

Even if an underlying system does not support wide characters, you can often 
emulate such support by combining multiple 1-column characters on the 
display. This is feasible only if a target language has a small set of 
characters in comparison with the size of a font area in a firmware.

BTW, the VGA font used in standard PCs is not only ASCII characters but also 
has extra characters. There is a table in the wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP437

Does pegasos support the same character set?

Okuji