Newsgroups: comp.editors
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!dgp.toronto.edu!dret
From: dret@dgp.toronto.edu (George Drettakis)
Subject: Re: Programming and international character sets.
Message-ID: <8811100059.AA21884@explorer.dgp.toronto.edu>
Summary: 8-bit vi
Keywords: 8-bit vi
Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
References: <532@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <8804@smoke.BRL.MIL> <4002@homxc.UUCP> <380@auspex.UUCP> <209@jhereg.Jhereg.MN.ORG> <398@auspex.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 88 19:59:54 EST

The Institute of Computer Science in Iraklion Crete, Greece has developed
a system for the support of Greek text in a 4.xBSD environment.
During the time I was there I was involved in the modification of
vi to support 8-bit characters. Three points are relevant to the discussion:
(a) The tty driver needs to be changed to allow 8-bit characters to pass
through. In 4.3 the change is trivial, but extending it to 16-bits could
be hairy. System V driver can be left unmodified for 8-bits.
(b) The changes to vi actually support 16 bit chars as the modifications
included changing the screen buffer to short array instead of char array.
(c) Supporting large character sets is a rather compilcated business as it
includes supporting the char set in several different places such as
terminal emulators, keyboard mapping, window systems etc.  Some code was
added to our vi to support greek letters for commands.

If anybody is interested write to:
Institute of Computer Science,
P.O. Box 1385
Iraklion, Crete, GR-711 10   GREECE,

and ask for a copy of Tech Report "Supporting 8-bit characters in Unix"
by George Drettakis and Vassilis Prevelakis (I dont have the number handy).

As far as I know SCO XENIX also supports 8-bit vi.

George Drettakis, Univeristy of Toronto, Canada.
UUCP:	dret@dgp.toronto.edu or dret@dgp.toronto.ca
BITNET:	dret@dgp.utoronto