LYNX-DEV Unicode support: charsets

[Drazen Kacar]

Klaus, I still don't know if console on OSF 4.0 can deal with Unicode or not,
but I've found out something else. I can't stand Linux only things :) Yur docs
say:

 - EXPERIMENTAL, currently enabled only for Linux console: 
   can (attempt to) automatically switch terminal mode and load new
   code pages on change of display character set.

The fact is that plain old xterm can do this. Here's the escape sequence:

ESC ] 5 0 ; "font name" BEL

For example:

^[]50;-dec-terminal-medium-r-normal--14-140-75-75-c-80-iso8859-2^G

Only one code page at the screen can be active this way and xterm will
resize itself if the font size changes. There might be a way to have more
than one code page, but I think special fonts are needed for that. Xterm
can switch fonts, but only the lower 128 chars. Don't ask me why not the
higher ones as well. Esc codes exist, but xterm docs say that they have
no visible effect in xterm. I've checked, they don't. Even if this was
possible, there'd be big problems with curses package which wouldn't know
it should send some esc codes. I suppose you can bypass it somehow for
the initializating sequence.

But, there is another trick for color xterm. I didn't check this one out,
because I don't know enough about Athena Widget Set. Basicaly, you can
define which font will be used for bold chars on a particular xterm.
You do this either by command line option or with Xdefaults. If there is
color, bold is not really needed and it can be dumped in favor of normal
font in another code page. Changing the fonts dinamically (ie. from
running Lynx processs) is beyond my abilities, but perhaps someone can do
the trick. If it's possible, there can be any two active code pages. If it
isn't, the user can (if he/she wants to) select two fixed code pages
before running xterm with Lynx. Or the bold font can be made fixed, and
you can change the normal one with esc sequence. This is a bit wierd, but
there is no esc code for changing bold font.

-- 
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

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