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

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2022, Aura Kelloniemi wrote:

> On 2022-02-01 at 20:26 -0500, Nicolas Pitre <nico at fluxnic.net> wrote:
>  > On Tue, 1 Feb 2022, Dave Mielke wrote:
>  > 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. At least in that case the total 
>  > spacing will be right and things will properly align vertically.
> 
> I'm against this. I have special braille glyphs for many emojis, but I still
> want the padding space (inserted by Linux) to be present after them.

Maybe the best solution is to allow for a screen glyph to define a 
braille representation that span more than one cell, and not only in 
contracted braille.

This way...

- there could be a default replacement braille representation for 
  single-width characters with no braille definition: "?"

- there could be a default replacement braille representation for 
  double-width characters with no braille definition: "? ", "?_", etc.

- and any braille representation you create in a braille table for any 
  character could either be single braille cell, double braille cells, 
  etc.

This way, if you want a double-witdh character to have a single braille 
cell, with or without padding, or ever a 3-cells representation, is up 
to you. That should in fact be a per-character choice.

The code is already there to deal with this in the contracted braille 
case. I think this should be generalized to the non contracted braille 
too.


Nicolas