Unicode Fonts and Tools for X11

(cl.cam.ac.uk)

18 points | by kristianp 2 days ago ago

5 comments

  • jech 2 hours ago

    That was a long time ago.

    Traditionally, character's under Unix were encoded in a locale-specific manner: ISO 8859-1 in Western Europe, ISO 8859-2 in Eastern Europe, EUC-JP in Japan, etc. In the 1990s, there was a major push to get XFree86 (the ancestor of X.Org) to switch to locale-independent UTF-8, lead mainly by Markus Kuhn and Bruno Haible.

    The link is to Markus Kuhn's web page, which appears to describe the UTF_8 software available around 1998 or so.

    • sheept 41 minutes ago

      UTF-8 is not locale independent. You cannot correctly render multilingual UTF-8 text without also specifying its locale, and some transformations like uppercase/lowercase also depend on the locale.

      • sourcegrift 18 minutes ago

        Eg: some cjk characters render differently based on whether mainland China, Taiwan, or Japan. One example 骨 (from my old notes so tiny chance this example is incorrect)

  • j16sdiz 7 minutes ago

    > created 1998-09-22 – last modified 2022-12-07

  • ufocia an hour ago

    A font is not a typeface