[MiNT] Some notes on fVDI and UTF (system) fonts

[Bohdan Milar <bohdan@milar.name>]

Hi all,

I have some additional ideas about the $subj.
But I guess nobody reads all the threads, so as an introduction I should mention I discussed those issues while translating 
XaAES during last two weeks. For more info, please see my mails

2011-01-18 02:11 Re: [MiNT] XaAES multi-language help needed
2011-01-22 12:39 Re: [MiNT] [ANNOUNCE] FreeMiNT 1.17.0 Released !


fVDI

We need a free and modern VDI. fVDI was updated 4 years ago and runs good in Aranym (as part of AFROS).
But there are some problems running it on real HW.
The fVDI kernel (fvdi.prg) seems to be relatively OK, so I guess the problem is mainly in drivers.
There is also rage.sys driver for Eclipse/RageII graphics cards.
But there are no drivers for other 3rd party cards (e.g. ET4000) used with Atari HW.

I think bitplane.sys is now the only driver for real Atari HW.
And even bitplane.sys has several problems (I was surprised when I saw some of those
problems, because Johan Klockars already solved them cca 10 years ago while I was
betatesting the old 1plane and 4plane drivers):

- Since XaAES is started, a block text cursor is blinking near the top-left corner of the screen.
- When XaAES just started, the mouse pointer is displayed near the top-left corner of the screen but it immediately jumps to the 
center of the screen as soon as you touch the mouse.
- Mouse pointer is totally white (so "invisible" on white areas) - I would prefer TOS-like (black with white border)
- Bitmap pictures are shown incorrectly (content compressed in the left quarter, the rest is a mass)
- When viewing a longer text using TTF fonts:
   - in HighWire only the first word on each line is displayed,
   - in qed when more words on 1 line (or in block) the text gets the same colour as background (so becomes invisible).

Is there anyone who can fix it please?
And authors of new drivers would be also helpful.
Somebody told me that writing the new drivers should not be so difficult.


UTF

I found several mentions of UTF (Unicode) in Atari SW during last few days.

1. FreeMiNT 1.17.0 - in doc/beginner/mint-en.stg:

The unicode.tbl file

The optional unicode.tbl file located in the system directory (i.e.
the same as mint.cnf is) contains supplemental data for the
default codepage tables, i.e. tables which map Unicode characters
into ASCII.

2. FreeMiNT 1.17.0 - in doc/readme.1.16.0

- loadable unicode translation tables

  This translation table is used by the (V)FAT(32) file system driver for
  ASCII <-> Unicode conversion of filenames. As the ASCII set above number 127
  is locale dependant, the kernel will use the translation table in order to
  obtain correct Unicode mapping. This option is rarely needed (dependant on
  your locale setting and whether you use VFAT and want to exchange data with
  Microsoft Windows).

3. HighWire 0.3.3

In the View menu, there are possibilities to use UTF to display the text on the web page.
Using the DeJaVu TTF font provided by fVDI, HighWire displays Czech UTF-8 web pages correctly!


So is there really no way to finish implementing Unicode in MiNT?
As we discussed earlier, it could be a problem for system font and (old) GEM applications
(especially using multi-byte texts in menus and other GEM parts).
But possibility of processing UTF data or running UTF CLI apps in shell would massively
increase the compatibility with PCs (personal data and Linux CLI applications).
Each application will have to handle the UTF data itself (like HighWire does), but will also
be able to handle ISO-8859-x (or other 8bit coding) data simply by changing the font
in the app (not the system one!)

Best regards,

Bohdan Milar