[HECnet] Non ASCII fonts on VMS?

[Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman-]

Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:

On 2013-09-28 11:30, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Yeah I was thinking of typing up some Arabic documents in say EDIT and using TYPE to view them - but Terminal.app doesn't seem to pass the Arabic letters across correctly.

I think you are a little confused.
"Arabic letters" as such don't pass through anywhere. We're talking 
computers here. Everything is ones and zeroes.
It's just a case of how you choose to interpret those ones and zeroes at 
each end. Are you saying that Terminal.app (a program I avoid by the 
way, since the VT100 emulation is buggy) do not pass all values? How are 
you using it, by the way?
Selected some arabic language on your MAC, running the terminal, typing 
in there, and in the terminal you have telnetted to some VMS box.

That might end up with the terminal sending UTF-8 encoded Unicode, which 
VMS might have some opinions about. VMS do not handle UTF-8, and some of 
the values you get from the UTF-8 encoding might cause VMS to do 
specific things.

The MAC will think of several bytes as one character encoded in UTF-8, 
but VMS will think of that as several characters in Latin-1, unless you 
are running some special program in VMS which grabs all incoming data, 
in which case you can (or course) do anything you want.

How are these files being exposed to the Terminal.app?   If by "$ TYPE",
then VMS doesn't know anything about the file contents other then its
record structure.   The information in it will be transmitted as bytes
of some value.   There is no interpretation of that data upon output. 
"$ TYPE" just pumps the file data into the terminal driver.

If the file contains the appropriate UTF for some Arabic letter, that
would be output to the Terminal.app.   THere may be some need for codes
that tell the Terminal.app to use the Arabic fonts; however, I believe
even that is handled by the accepted UTF encoding.

FWIW, VMS does handle arabic numerals.   :)

-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker       VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.