text mode and dozens of languages displayed... how?

[zhak]

hi, people!
one question bothers me for a long time already. when installing linux in text mode, it suggests to select a language to use. there are dozens of languages available, and japanese, chinese, etc. how is it possible to display all those language-specific characters in text mode??? i doubt that fn 0x1100 int 0x10 or similar is used for this.

[inflater]

Well, using ROM BIOS you can load a custom text font, for example I use kamenicky in my OS. That way you can replace some characters with your own.
Dunno about the japinees clickyhack mess, you maybe try Unicode.

[zhak]

so you say that 256-char table is filled with characters from various languages to display only letters that are needed? and then, when a language is selected this custom charmap is replaced with the default one for the selected lang?

[inflater]

Nope. The table is loaded all with standard ASCII characters + language-specific characters. For example "ABCD" would be displayed correctly on both code page 437 (standard IBM ascii) and code page 852 (8859-2), but e.g. "ábč" wouldn't.

Linux I think has Unicode.

[jal]

one question bothers me for a long time already. when installing linux in text mode, it suggests to select a language to use. there are dozens of languages available, and japanese, chinese, etc. how is it possible to display all those language-specific characters in text mode??? i doubt that fn 0x1100 int 0x10 or similar is used for this.

In text mode, you can use at max 256 characters, 512 if you restrict yourself to 8 different colours (instead of 16). Any language can be displayed, as long as it is happy with this number of characters. Chinese obviously is not, Japanese can get by with only Hiragana/Katakana, so I guess that's what's used. Any OS using text mode must map Unicode to the limited number of characters using a map, or code page.


JAL

[mystran]

The Linux stuff is a hack at best. There are basically two reasonable character sets to use: ASCII and Unicode.. and you gotta admit you need graphics mode for the latter.

also: Linux can run it's "text-mode" console using graphics mode as well.. not sure if they use that to do full unicode, but in any case the idea of "text-mode" in Linux is slightly fuzzy.