http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/i18n/2001-March/001379.html

> Also, the new xterm support -u8, there is ja and ko in ISO 10646-1,
> but how to make ISO 10646-1 font works with Chinese?

The ja and ko fonts also contain all glyphs from the commonly used Chinese character sets. They just prefer glyphs from Japanese or Korean character sets where multiple glyphs were available for a single Unicode position. The ideographic *-ISO10646-1 fonts from the ucs-fonts-asian package are a bit of an experimental nature and comments would be very appreciated. I can easily generate a cn version as well using the same software that we used to merge the 18x18 ja and ko fonts. Just suggest a priority order of existing fonts that you would prefer to see merged into a cn font. See the .changes files in the ucs-fonts-asian for documentation on how these fonts were generated.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts-asian.tar.gz

With regard to UTF-8 support for xterm:

We seem unfortunately be heading towards a version split. XFree86 has long ago started its own very actively maintained development thread of xterm, managed by Thomas Dickey

http://dickey.his.com/xterm/ ftp://dickey.his.com/xterm/

with various extensions by Robert Brady:

http://www.zepler.org/~rwb197/xterm/

The semantics and design ideas behind this xterm version is summarized for example on

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#xterm

in particular considering the behaviour with regard to choosing between normal and wide characters and handling combining characters. This xterm has deliberately (temporarily) hardwired-in support for

in order to guarantee portable usability even on platforms without UTF-8 locale support.

On the other hand, there is now an independent new and not yet widely used Li18nux/X.Org patch for xterm available that is more based on the i18n mechanics of X11 (X Output Methods in particular) that was originally introduced to accomodate national CJK encodings and the suitability of which for Unicode support is still a somewhat controversial topic.

http://www.li18nux.org/subgroups/utildev/dli18npatch.html

How suitable it is in practice for UTF-8 usage (especially considering the large number of practical detail issues that have been discussed on the linux-utf8 mailing list during the past year) will have to be tested thoroughly first.

I'm somewhat disappointed that this second xterm development thread by Li18nux/X.Org was never properly announced/advertised to XFree86 xterm developers here. There still seem to be disappointing communication problems.

Markus G. Kuhn