add unicode.txt

Signed-off-by: Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux@googlemail.com>
This commit is contained in:
Denys Vlasenko 2010-02-01 15:58:08 +01:00
parent c8e18ca12c
commit 698dca5805

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Unicode support in busybox
There are several scenarios where we need to handle unicode
correctly.
Shell input
We want to correctly handle input of unicode characters.
There are several problems with it. Just handling input
as sequence of bytes would break any editing. This was fixed
and now lineedit operates on the array of wchar_t's.
But we also need to handle the following problematic moments:
* It is unreasonable to expect that output device supports
_any_ unicode chars. Perhaps we need to avoid printing
those chars which are not supported by output device.
Examples: chars which are not present in the font,
chars which are not assigned in unicode,
combining chars (especially trying to combine bad pairs:
a_chinese_symbol + "combining grave accent" = ??!)
* We need to account for the fact that unicode chars have
different widths: 0 for combining chars, 1 for usual,
2 for ideograms (are there 3+ wide chars?).
* Bidirectional handling. If user wants to echo a phrase
in Hebrew, he types: echo "srettel werbeH"
Editors
This case is a bit similar to "shell input", but unlike shell,
editors may encounder many more unexpected unicode sequences
(try to load a random binry file...), and they need to preserve
them, unlike shell which can afford to drop bogus input.
more, less
.
ls (multi-column display)
.
top, ps
.
Filename display (in error messages and elsewhere)
.
TODO: write an email to Asmus Freytag (asmus@unicode.org),
author of http://unicode.org/reports/tr11/