Syslinux - Jan 2008 - RFD: Internationalizing the menu system

I know quite a few people have interest in internationalizing the menu 
system.  This is a tricky problem, since have a full-blown rendering 
engine for the more complex languages (Indic, Semitic and East Asian 
languages being the main ones that have substantial complexities.)

Given that, I was thinking that the most sensible thing might be to 
pre-render strings (basically menu items and messages) as PNG images.

That begs a couple of questions:

- First, how interesting is this to the user community?
- What kind of resolution is required?  In particular, is the current
   16-pixel text rows sufficient?  Does support or lack of support of
   antialiasing affect this?
- How to deal with the countdown timer?
- What about serial console?

I'd appreciate feedback.

	-hpa

> I know quite a few people have interest in internationalizing 
> the menu system.
>
> - First, how interesting is this to the user community?
Well, being swedish, extended characters in the menu system would
certainly be welcome. I don't know much about how the simple menu system
works, perhaps a selectable character set is all that's required,
ISO-8859-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1) would do it for me.

/Daniel

--On Tuesday, January 22, 2008 02:00:19 PM +0100 Lindgren Daniel 
<daniel.lindgren at tullverket.se> wrote:
>> Not to mention the default character set (cp437) includes all
>> the Swedish characters.
>
> You are aboslutely right. While testing I missed verifying codepage of
> the file, vi automatically saves it as ISO8859-1 if I insert an extended
> character. I have to edit it in vi and then convert it with iconv to be
> absolutely sure.
Use :set fileencoding=cp437 to get vim to write files in that codepage. 
For  more information, see :help fileencoding; for a list of supported 
encodings, see :help encoding-names

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+ at cmu.edu>
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA