[Gllug] Fullscreen 80x24 internationalised X terminal?

[Russell Howe]

On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 03:42:40PM +0800, Richard Cohen wrote:
> Fighting with an issue here at work - wanted to put it out to the
> combined masses for help.
> 
> We have a legacy app, running in curses-type mode, fixed at 80x24.
> For operational reasons, we want to run it under X, and it needs to be
> in a context where it can display BIG5 Chinese text.  Unfortunately,
> we also need it to be fullscreen...
> 
> At the moment, we're running it in mlterm, which does a decent job of
> the internationalising part - although there are some issues with
> escape codes which I think may be related to wide characters being
> used - but is lousy at the fullscreen side of things.  Unfortunately,
> there's an aspect ratio mismatch between a 4:3 monitor and an 80x24
> terminal window.
> 
> Any advice?  Anyone know of any terminal emulators which can do
> fullscreen, scaling as necessary?

Anything which can use opengl for rendering shouldn't have a problem
with this, I guess.. same for anything which uses ggi. Not sure I can
think of any terms which can do big5 as well as rendering to such a
visual though...

You may well find that something like setting the screen background to
black using xsetroot and then firing up a terminal with a large font,
no border and no window manager will do something close enough?

urxvt is currently my choice for a terminal, although you might need to
do some fiddling with fonts to get big5 to display nicely (you need to
give chinese fonts priority over japanese fonts, otherwise when you have
a character which has glyphs in both chinese and japanese fonts, the
temrinal might favour the japanese glyph.

urxvt also supports xft, which is nice when it works..

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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