[BRLTTY] Multi-column characters (was: Re: 6.5 soon)

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2022, Dave Mielke wrote:

> [quoted lines by Nicolas Pitre on 2022/02/01 at 20:26 -0500]
> 
> >I think the default should be for wide characters that have no braille 
> >representation (currently represented by a question mark) to span 2 
> >cells with blank padding by default. 
> 
> What if there aren't enough spaces at the end of the row? Should excess non-space characters at the end be dropped or should wide character padding stop early?

Just truncate the padding. It is there really just to preserve original 
spacing and vertical alignment. No one will be confused by a missing 
padding on a character for which we only have the ? replacement 
representation.

> >>You still can get a full description of such characters with DESCHAR if 
> >needed. 
> 
> That doesn't actually work very well as the ICU descriptions for those characters are essentially useless. We'd need to add a (possibly language-dependent) table that gives proper descriptions for those characters. If we do, I'm not sure it's something we'd want to go through the effort of localizing.

I get things like "hiragana letter ni" or "katakana letter ne" or 
"arabic letter alef" which appears to be good enough. When those are 
actually meaningful to someone then they're likely to have a proper 
braille representation anyway. Otherwise it is best to preserve spacing 
so that things like window borders or columns still align properly.


Nicolas