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> I got a perfect multilingual console No, you didn't. If it was using Unifont, there are many scripts and languages that it was unable to display correctly be

• packet_nerd 8y ago
  To add to this, here's a few example complex text layout languages in no particular order: Thai, Khmer, Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, Burmese, Tibetan, Punjabi, Sanskrit, and many many others. Many millions (billions?) of people won't be able to use your terminal in their language.
  • irrational 8y ago
    Also ancient language like Egyptian Hieroglyphics.
• usrusr 8y ago
  > Displaying one nominal glyph per Unicode character does not result in readable text for many languages Completely unreadable, even to people with a basic understanding of the inner workings of Unicode and some practice with the font, or just not matching the norms of correctness? Decipherable but clearly not correct would mark the sweet spot between being just as bad as placeholders and being so good that it undermines efforts for having a proper font for a given language.
  • jfk13 8y ago
    The degree of badness varies among languages/scripts. In some cases, yes, most readers would be able to decipher the intended content. In others, no, it really would be unreadable, except to those geeky enough to also comfortably "decipher" things like \x74\x68\x69\x73. Would you be happy routinely reading your terminal text in that form?
    • yorwba 8y ago
      > it really would be unreadable, except to those geeky enough to also comfortably "decipher" things like \x74\x68\x69\x73 Can you give an example?
      • jfk13 8y ago
        Try something in Devanagari script such as "क्षत्रिय" and see how it looks with Unifont. The results may vary, depending whether some kind of shaping engine (like Uniscribe, Pango, HarfBuzz, etc) gets involved in the process, but I'm confident it will be far from correct, and most readers would struggle to recognise it.
        • mmastrac 8y ago
          I think your example can be illustrated by adding spaces between the characters like so: क्षत्रिय vs क् ष त्रि य (note how the first "glyph" decomposed into two drastically different characters)
          • jfk13 8y ago
            Actually, your "decomposed" version still has clusters that are different from the individual characters making them up. There's क्, which is क plus ् (OK, that one's easy); more significantly, you've left त्रि as a single unit whereas it is made up of त + ् + र + ि. So "spelled-out", क्षत्रिय is made up of क ् ष त ् र ि य . I don't know if Unifont tries to render the combining characters as zero-width overstrikes, or what, but much more than that is needed for a readable result.
            • jessaustin 8y ago
              Wow thanks for spelling that out. That seems like a challenging script!
            • a1369209993 8y ago
              That looks plenty readable. Ugly as hell, sure, but not any worse then 3N6|_15H \/\/R1773N 45 1337 5P34|<, for example. It's a vast improvement over [0915][094D][0937][0924][094D][0930][093F][092F].
  • chipuni 8y ago
    Unreadable. Arabic has a strong difference between letters of the same word, and different words. There is no exact equivalent in English... b&u&t&i&t&m&i&g&h&t&b&e&s&o&m&e&t&h&i&n&g&l&i&k&e&t&h&i&s
    • usrusr 8y ago
      If that example is representative, I'd definitely put it in the "readable" bin. Leaps and bounds from what you'd want to read, but infinitely more useful than a sequence of identical placeholders. Even just being able to tell wether two strings might be identical or not would be an improvement over blank placeholders.
    • svat 8y ago
      There's also complex text layout (vowel-sign reordering) for Indic scripts, where some (not all) vowel signs require repositioning from phonetic order to visual order. Adding just that aspect to your example (without other complications like positioning of matras or conjunct consonant glyphs) makes it something closer to: b&t&u&t&i&m&g&h&t&i&b&s&e&m&o&t&e&h&n&g&i&l&k&i&t&e&h&s&i