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A comment on Programming the Linux Framebuffer.

Re:Programming the Linux Framebuffer by vesinisa on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @04:19PM (#16277635)
As a non-English speaker, my obvious question is how does the PSF2 format encode fonts with more than 256 glyphs? How would one go about implementing Unicode text rendering? Combine glyphs from multiple 8-bit codepages to get the required characters?

Does the Linux system console support Unicode in the first place?

edit: the linked header file[1] explains that a single PSF2 can actually encode any number of glyphs (not just 256), and additional meta-information after the bitmaps spell out which Unicode code points OR combining character sequences each bitmap corresponds to.

[1]: https://github.com/legionus/kbd/blob/master/src/psf.h

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Re:Programming the Linux Framebuffer by jwilk on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @06:28PM (#16278524)
Linux console supports up to 512 glyphs and has only minimal Unicode support.

There are terminal emulators, such as fbterm or kmscon, that use framebuffer and might have better Unicode support.

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Re:Programming the Linux Framebuffer by bringtheaction on Thursday February 01, 2018 @08:10AM (#16281578)
kmscon looks pretty neat.

Anyone have any experience with it?

Was it easy to set up? Does it make for a comfortable environment? Is it relatively easy to write your own applications that can output on top of the frame buffer, e.g. if you are developing a game with OpenGL and want to develop in this environment and to test your game from there as well?

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Re:Programming the Linux Framebuffer by Fnoord on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @04:52PM (#16277866)
Not sure if this answers your question but I already ran a Matrix screensaver in a framebuffer on Linux ~16 years ago. As per this post I believe it was cmatrix [1]. There's a screenshot on that page. If you look carefully you can notice some odd symbols.

One could also use MPlayer + libcaca + framebuffer.

[1] https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/cmatrix-none-...

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Re:Programming the Linux Framebuffer by khedoros1 on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @05:15PM (#16278046)
> Does the Linux system console support Unicode in the first place?

I have various files in Chinese and Japanese, and they display correctly for me in Linux, even under the console.

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