Choosing appropriate keymaps and fonts

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

Matthew Burgess wrote:
> Hi,
>
> How does one go about choosing the correct keymaps and fonts for their system?  I've read over chapter07/console.html several times but still have a couple of questions.
>
> What I'm trying to do is configure a system to have a UK keymap and have a UTF-8 capable console.  So far, I've got:
>
> UNICODE="1"
> KEYMAP="uk"
>
> However, as you'll note, unlike the Belgian keymap mentioned in the book, the UK keymap doesn't have a UTF-8 variant.  I'm told I need to choose a LEGACY_CHARSET so that the bootscript will convert it to UTF-8 on the fly.  The example for the ru_ms keymap is to convert the KOI8-R keymap, but I can't find any such keymap on my system.
>
> I think what is needed here is to look in /lib/kbd/consoletrans and pick a suitable [charset]_to_uni.trans file.

No, the character sets for converting the keymaps are built into the 
"dumpkeys" program, and the full list is available in the "dumpkeys 
--help" output.

>   So, I think I need '8859-1' in my LEGACY_CHARSET variable, right?
>   

No, iso-8859-1.

> If the above is correct, I think the following change might be suitable for the book:
>
> "There is no pre-made UTF-8 Russian keyamp, therefore it has to be produced by converting the existing KOI8-R keymap as illustrated below:"
>
> becomes
>
> "There is no pre-made UTF-8 Russian keyamp, therefore it has to be produced by converting the existing KOI8-R character set as illustrated below (available non-Unicode to Unicode character set mappings are available in /lib/kbd/consoletrans):"
>   

No. Maybe: "There is no pre-made UTF-8 Russian keyamp, therefore it has 
to be produced by converting the existing KOI8-R keymap as illustrated 
below. Correct spelling for source character set names for the 
LEGACY_CHARSET option are available in the dumpkeys --help output."

Or maybe move the "Correct spelling..." sentence to the description of 
the LEGACY_CHARSET option description.

Basically, the reader has to know that the existing Russian keymap is 
for KOI8-R users, and that the correct spelling of this character set 
name for dumpkeys is "koi8-r".

And BTW, the next version of kbd does have a UTF-8 Russian keymap (as 
"ru"), so we may need another example.

> Similarly, for fonts, how do I determine which ones are UTF-8 capable and what flags I need to pass to setfont, via the FONT variable, so that it will display correctly?
>   

All *.psfu.gz fonts are supposed to be displayed correctly, because 
every font has the screen font map in it that maps font positions to 
Unicode (and in non-UTF-8 environments, the application charset map, 
supploed via the -m switch, also matters - it maps application output 
bytes to Unicode). However, there are a few fonts with a wrong screen 
font map, e.g. lat2a-16.

The LiveCD defaults to the following for en_GB.UTF-8:

KEYMAP="uk"
UNICODE=1
BROKEN_COMPOSE=0
FONT="lat1-16 -m 8859-1"   # Suboptimal - no Euro sign, and the -m 
option was used only by the patched 2.6.16 kernel in LFS-6.2 (for dead 
keys and composing)
LEGACY_CGARSET="iso-8859-1"

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov