Re: 2-bytes character display ready ?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Tuesday, February 19, 2002, at 11:53 AM, Pete French wrote:

> > In PostScript, a 'string' is explicitly defined as an array of 
> > integers,
> > each in the range 0 to 255 ie an array of bytes.
>
> Hmm, so how are characters outside that range represented ?

I think that's already been answered a couple of times, including in the 
email
you quoted.
Either you switch font objects to get a different character encoding, or 
you send
characters in the format of pairs of 8-bit values.

> Are they
> in UTF-8 ?

No.

> > The DPSshow() function is a convenience for simple nul terminated C
> > strings ... and can't pass the full set of postscript strings we need 
> > to use.
>
> Could we not treat the argument as if it were UTF-8, which is then 
> backwards
> compatible with ASCII and doesnt require an extra interface ?

Not if we want to retain compatibility with things like the X dps 
extension.
In fact, I'm not sure that DPSshow() is ok to send 8-bit data ... it may 
only
be for ascii.

Basically we need to pass binary data to the show operator ... and 
DPSshow()
doesn't let us do that.