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1. Embed this notice
   jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Mar-2026 21:51:54 JST jwz

   Linux Xft Unicode fonts.

   Dear Lazyweb, can someone show me a straightforward example of an X11 program calling XftDrawStringUtf8 that succeeds in displaying Japanese characters? On Debian 13 with "fonts-noto" installed, "lxterminal" can do it but XScreenSaver still can't seem to display anything more complicated than Cyrillic.

   E.g. "unicrud --block Katakana".
   https://jwz.org/b/yk39

   • Embed this notice
     jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Mar-2026 21:51:53 JST jwz

     in reply to

     [ taps headset ]

     I am now being informed that in this -- The Year of our Linux Desktop 2026 -- it is impossible to take an arbitrary UTF-8 string and render all of the characters in it.

     You just can't get there from here.

     Good to know.

   • Embed this notice
     Peter Krefting (nafmo@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Mar-2026 21:51:53 JST Peter Krefting

     in reply to

     @jwz Well, you can, once you have found out what the characters in that UTF-8 string of yours are. There's no 1-to-1 mapping between bytes and codepoints, or codepoints and characters, or characters and graphemes, or graphemes and glyphs.

     That's why we have (for instance) Pango:
     https://www.gtk.org/docs/architecture/pango

   • Embed this notice
     Peter Krefting (nafmo@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Thursday, 05-Mar-2026 21:55:46 JST Peter Krefting

     in reply to

     @jwz Writing systems are weird.

     I remember that I had so many assumptions that were shatters back when we implemented Unicode support in Opera 6. I had it easy, I "only" did the encoding conversions Unicode algorithm implementations, rendering was another team...

   • Embed this notice
     jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Mar-2026 21:55:47 JST jwz

     in reply to

     • Peter Krefting

     @nafmo Oh, bullshit