Mailing List Archive: RFD: Internationalizing the menu system

RFD: Internationalizing the menu system

Jan 21, 2008, 10:12 PM

Post #1 of 7 (4844 views)

I know quite a few people have interest in internationalizing the menu
system. This is a tricky problem, since have a full-blown rendering
engine for the more complex languages (Indic, Semitic and East Asian
languages being the main ones that have substantial complexities.)

Given that, I was thinking that the most sensible thing might be to
pre-render strings (basically menu items and messages) as PNG images.

That begs a couple of questions:

- First, how interesting is this to the user community?
- What kind of resolution is required? In particular, is the current
16-pixel text rows sufficient? Does support or lack of support of
antialiasing affect this?
- How to deal with the countdown timer?
- What about serial console?

I'd appreciate feedback.

-hpa

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Re: RFD: Internationalizing the menu system [ In reply to ]

daniel.lindgren at tullverket

Jan 21, 2008, 11:25 PM

Post #2 of 7 (4686 views)

> I know quite a few people have interest in internationalizing
> the menu system.
>
> - First, how interesting is this to the user community?

Well, being swedish, extended characters in the menu system would
certainly be welcome. I don't know much about how the simple menu system
works, perhaps a selectable character set is all that's required,
ISO-8859-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1) would do it for me.

/Daniel

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Re: RFD: Internationalizing the menu system [ In reply to ]

Jan 21, 2008, 11:59 PM

Post #3 of 7 (4690 views)

Lindgren Daniel wrote:
>> I know quite a few people have interest in internationalizing
>> the menu system.
>>
>> - First, how interesting is this to the user community?
>
> Well, being swedish, extended characters in the menu system would
> certainly be welcome. I don't know much about how the simple menu system
> works, perhaps a selectable character set is all that's required,
> ISO-8859-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1) would do it for me.
>

You already have that (see the "font" configuration command.)

Not to mention the default character set (cp437) includes all the
Swedish characters.

I'm more concerned at the moment with character sets that don't work too
well with a 256-character monospaced font.

-hpa

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Re: RFD: Internationalizing the menu system [ In reply to ]

daniel.lindgren at tullverket

Jan 22, 2008, 5:00 AM

Post #4 of 7 (4686 views)

> Not to mention the default character set (cp437) includes all
> the Swedish characters.

You are aboslutely right. While testing I missed verifying codepage of
the file, vi automatically saves it as ISO8859-1 if I insert an extended
character. I have to edit it in vi and then convert it with iconv to be
absolutely sure.

/Daniel

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Re: RFD: Internationalizing the menu system [ In reply to ]

buraphalinuxserver at gmail

Jan 22, 2008, 5:15 AM

Post #5 of 7 (4674 views)

Hello,

Here are my ideas. Maybe it is all bad, but you did ask....

Our distribution is for Thai, and would very much like to have the
ability to display Thai. The ability to display pre-rendered pictures
would be fine. Instead of having a set size, why not just let the
picture specify the width and height in pixels of each menu item?
Then have a menu checker tool that does what vesamenu would do to
compute the menu total size of the menu. If the menu won't fit on the
screen , the checker tool says 'no'. If you allow something like:

label superos
labelpic superos.pic
kernel whatever

where superos.pic is the graphic file. If the menu system really
cannot render the pic (file not found) it can fall back to the label
'superos' instead, and you could require 'superos' label is in ASCII.
Then you can use the same file for the normal menu and just ignore the
labelpic data too.

The superos.pic would have embedded in it the height and width of the
graphic. I guess having a .png or whatever decoder is too much for
the system, but like now you have the tool to embed data in the
background image, you can have a converter from .png or whatever to
your .pic format you need. Even 16 colors indexed would be enough I
think to make nice text.

With variable size pictures, you can handle easy fonts like English or
tough stuff like Thai by just changing the height of pictures as
necessary.

I would love to test such a system for you ;-)

JGH

On 1/22/08, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> wrote:
> Lindgren Daniel wrote:
> >> I know quite a few people have interest in internationalizing
> >> the menu system.
> >>
> >> - First, how interesting is this to the user community?
> >
> > Well, being swedish, extended characters in the menu system would
> > certainly be welcome. I don't know much about how the simple menu system
> > works, perhaps a selectable character set is all that's required,
> > ISO-8859-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1) would do it for me.
> >
>
> You already have that (see the "font" configuration command.)
>
> Not to mention the default character set (cp437) includes all the
> Swedish characters.
>
> I'm more concerned at the moment with character sets that don't work too
> well with a 256-character monospaced font.
>
> -hpa
>
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>

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Re: RFD: Internationalizing the menu system [ In reply to ]

Jan 22, 2008, 9:53 AM

Post #6 of 7 (4681 views)

BuraphaLinux Server wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Here are my ideas. Maybe it is all bad, but you did ask....
>
> Our distribution is for Thai, and would very much like to have the
> ability to display Thai. The ability to display pre-rendered pictures
> would be fine. Instead of having a set size, why not just let the
> picture specify the width and height in pixels of each menu item?

That would be a massive pain from an overall structure perspective,
especially trying to maintain compatibility with a serial console.
Sorry, I really DO NOT want to bite off this particular issue.

> The superos.pic would have embedded in it the height and width of the
> graphic. I guess having a .png or whatever decoder is too much for
> the system, but like now you have the tool to embed data in the
> background image, you can have a converter from .png or whatever to
> your .pic format you need. Even 16 colors indexed would be enough I
> think to make nice text.

I already have a PNG decoder, that's not the issue.

"16 colors indexed" is actually quite a bit. A serious question is if
anything more than a bitmap (with a possible highlight color for the
hotkeys) is needed, e.g. greyscale for antialiasing.

-hpa

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Re: RFD: Internationalizing the menu system [ In reply to ]

Jan 22, 2008, 10:58 AM

Post #7 of 7 (4680 views)

--On Tuesday, January 22, 2008 02:00:19 PM +0100 Lindgren Daniel
<daniel.lindgren@tullverket.se> wrote:

>> Not to mention the default character set (cp437) includes all
>> the Swedish characters.
>
> You are aboslutely right. While testing I missed verifying codepage of
> the file, vi automatically saves it as ISO8859-1 if I insert an extended
> character. I have to edit it in vi and then convert it with iconv to be
> absolutely sure.

Use :set fileencoding=cp437 to get vim to write files in that codepage.
For more information, see :help fileencoding; for a list of supported
encodings, see :help encoding-names

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA

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