Arabic and Hebrew on the console

[Matthew Woehlke]

Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> Since RedHat Linux 8, "latarcyrherb-sun16"  is the default console font. 
> It seems that it was chosen in assumption that 
> ascii+latin+cyrillic+hebrew+arabic in one a font should satisfy all the 
> needs of console users.
> 
> But "latarcyrheb-sun16" is so-called 512-glyphs font. Unfortunately, 
> there is a restriction in hardware, which decreases the amount of 
> available console colors if console font has more than 256 glyphs.

Isn't Kernel Mode Setting supposed to fix this? (...because we won't be 
using hardware text mode and so will be able to use our own kernel glyph 
rendering code that won't have this restriction, and incidentally would 
allow things like very-high-resolution and 24-bit color on VT's?)

> As a result, people who (for some reasons) use TUI on console have no 
> yellow and bolding anymore.
> 
> The solution looks simple -- just change the default "latarcyrheb-sun16" 
> to some old good 256-gliph font. It is an obvious thing, especially in 
> fact that actually the "latin+cyrillic+hebrew+arabic" combination seems 
> never used in a real life of console. What seems to be used is just 
> "ascii + local native language" (ie. ascii+latin1, ascii+cyrillic etc.), 
> and such combinations do not exceed 256-glyph limit.

Yup. Granted, I don't use the VT's *all* that much (though I do, on 
occasion), but one of the first changes I make to a system is usually to 
set the font back to lat0-*. (I'd use lat0-10 or lat0-8 except switching 
to/from X tends to not restore the hardware font correctly; in fact I'm 
probably getting the BIOS font at that point.)

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
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