Arabic and Hebrew on the console

[Dmitry Butskoy]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> We currently display Arabic and Hebrew translations on the virtual
> console in LTR mode using the glyphs in latarcyrheb-sun16. Obviously,
> that's not the preferred way.
>   

I would like to describe some related issue here.

Since RedHat Linux 8, "latarcyrherb-sun16"  is the default console font. 
It seems that it was chosen in assumption that 
ascii+latin+cyrillic+hebrew+arabic in one a font should satisfy all the 
needs of console users.

But "latarcyrheb-sun16" is so-called 512-glyphs font. Unfortunately, 
there is a restriction in hardware, which decreases the amount of 
available console colors if console font has more than 256 glyphs.

As a result, people who (for some reasons) use TUI on console have no 
yellow and bolding anymore.

The solution looks simple -- just change the default "latarcyrheb-sun16" 
to some old good 256-gliph font. It is an obvious thing, especially in 
fact that actually the "latin+cyrillic+hebrew+arabic" combination seems 
never used in a real life of console. What seems to be used is just 
"ascii + local native language" (ie. ascii+latin1, ascii+cyrillic etc.), 
and such combinations do not exceed 256-glyph limit.

But the switch to some of old 256-glyph fonts leads to lack of some  
glyphs (fe. euro sign) which became needed now. Hence it would be fine 
to split latarcyrheb-sun16 to several 256-glyphs fonts and use such 
fonts by default on console.


Regards,
Dmitry Butskoy
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/DmitryButskoy