Re: [Slightly OT] UTF-8 support in *nix terminals (Was: Re: Syntactic differences within parts of speech)

Hi!

H. S. Teoh writes:
> On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 05:16:53PM -0400, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> [...]
> > Hmm, my normal news reader does not support UTF-8 via the xterm terminal
> > I am currently using, so I will try the web form to post this:
> >
> > '買い取る'
> > ka i to ru
> >
> > The first Kanji is the same as in <kau> '買う' and '取る'
> > is 'to take'.
> [...]
>
> I'm pleasantly surprised that I'm actually reading those characters in
> my console-based emailer (mutt). I've recently found a good Unicode
> bitmap font for X11, and finally made the switch from xterm to
> rxvt-unicode, and switched my default locale to UTF-8. And ever since,
> I've been pleasantly surprised, on more than one occasion.
>...
Hmm, all installed on this machine, no problem, I'm actually seeing
the Kanji now, too. :-) The only thing that's missing now is support
for ttf-fonts or knowledge how to enable that, because I *love*
DejaVu Mono in my xterms and strongly dislike Emacs for not supporting
it yet.

>...
> <ObConlang>
>
> Speaking of fonts, has anyone experimented with purely vertical writing
> systems? (I.e., one where you simply *cannot* write horizontally without
> severely crippling the system.) Even better, has anyone gotten vertical
> writing to actually *work* in an application, say your browser?
>...
What?  That's strange.  *Yesterday* I was browsing for Mongolian text
samples and talked with my wife about how browsers, etc. would look
like when it's perfectly supported.  Is the title bar on the left and
the [OK]-button in a column of buttons on the right (or vice versa)?
That's a very nice idea and I was about to fake screen shots...  But
maybe it exists?  Hardly, I guess.  Or does any OS or application
really do this?  Screenshots!

A web browser would probably be funny, because the URL should still be
displayed horizontally, so you could have the URL in a top bar, the
title and menu bars on the left/right and any dialog buttons would
occur on the opposite side.

>...
> I decided instead to go with a completely vertical system. In this new
> system, the glyphs stack on each other and resembles decorations of a
> pillar (or a totem-pole-like thing),
Funny -- quite like Mongolian.  I really like that script.  Did you
have the idea from there?

> and there are left- and
> right-diacritics. (Laevocritics?  Gauchocritics? I tried looking for the
> appropriate Greek root since -critic comes from Greek, but came up with
> 'aristocritic', which just sounds too lame.)
>...
Hehe. :-)  But hypercritics are no better.

**Henrik

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