Re: less & composing characters - fix

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Mark Nudelman wrote:
> 
> > >   * About Non-Spacing Marks like Fatha it makes more sense.  But
> > > again, the problem is that:  Terminals like xterm and probably
> > > mlterm, put the mark on top of the character, so no width
> > > allocated for the mark.  But what we're gonna do in Linux
> > > console?  There (as done by BiCon now), a non-spacing mark still
> > > occupies a single width.  So how's less gonna handle this case?
> >
> > Oh dear.  This is news to me.  So there are some terminals which honor
> > composing characters (make them take zero width), and others that do
> > not?  Is it safe to assume there are only two types of terminals, those
> > that honor all composing chars and those that honor none of them?  Or
> 
> I'm afraid not.
> 
> > could there be a terminal that treats some composing chars as zero width
> > and others as normal spacing chars.
> 
> Well, I really don't like the idea of less handling this kind of
> things :(.  It is quite probable that people run a couple of
> filters on their terminal.  More advanced terminals like mlterm
> can be assumed as filters themselves.  This filters may handle
> composing characters in any random way.

Behdad, I can't disagree more with you on this (sorry).  I tried
less-385 on mlterm and on xterm (no Arabic support there) and it
worked equally well without any issues.  Hindering progress in
search of "probable" solutions is not something I'd recommend.
If the concern that various different terminal emulators will
handle composing characters differently and that _may_ pose a
problem, then we need to standardize on how this handling is
done and not handicap other applications' support.

BTW: that disappearing issue (remember when you search) happens
     on xterms as well (Mark, use the files I mailed you to see
     what I mean), so now I'm 90% convinced that less is doing
     something odd with regard to display when the file contains
     lines that are longer than the terminal's width.  Furthermore,
     this is NOT specific to multi-byte files (ie. Arabic), I'm
     seeing this happening on ASCII files too.

Salam.

 - Nadim

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