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  • Determine size demand of (Unicode-)characters on terminal from shell

    From Janis Papanagnou@21:1/5 to All on Mon Dec 27 14:07:03 2021
    I'm using ANSI escape codes ("\033[%d;%dH") to position Unicode
    characters on a terminal window. The indices to provide for %d
    are suited for (e.g.) the Latin character sets, but not for
    character sets where characters require more than one unit for
    the displayed glyph, e.g. like the Chinese characters. So with
    a Latin character set I'd use indices 1, 2, 3, ... and for the
    Asian sets I's use 1, 3, 5, ... to position the characters at
    the screen. My question:

    Is the size that the character glyphs need for representation
    on a terminal somehow retrievable, so that I get, say, for
    Unicode character \U0041 a value of 1 and for \U30ee a value
    of 2, so that I can automatize the displaying on a terminal?

    Janis

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  • From Janis Papanagnou@21:1/5 to Janis Papanagnou on Mon Dec 27 16:00:03 2021
    On 27.12.2021 14:07, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
    I'm using ANSI escape codes ("\033[%d;%dH") to position Unicode
    characters on a terminal window. The indices to provide for %d
    are suited for (e.g.) the Latin character sets, but not for
    character sets where characters require more than one unit for
    the displayed glyph, e.g. like the Chinese characters. So with
    a Latin character set I'd use indices 1, 2, 3, ... and for the
    Asian sets I's use 1, 3, 5, ... to position the characters at
    the screen. My question:

    Is the size that the character glyphs need for representation
    on a terminal somehow retrievable, so that I get, say, for
    Unicode character \U0041 a value of 1 and for \U30ee a value
    of 2, so that I can automatize the displaying on a terminal?

    In another newsgroup I was directed to a StackExchange post.[*]

    'wc -L' seems to be the solution for me; it's non-standard but works
    on my system at least.

    $ printf "\U30ee" | wc -L
    2
    $ printf "\U0041" | wc -L
    1


    Janis

    [*] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/245013/get-the-display-width-of-a-string-of-characters

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    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Janis Papanagnou@21:1/5 to Janis Papanagnou on Sat Jan 15 10:43:39 2022
    On 27.12.2021 16:00, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
    [ characters from different languages (or Unicode planes) require
    differing amounts of cells for displaying in a terminal window ]

    'wc -L' seems to be the solution for me; it's non-standard but works
    on my system at least.

    $ printf "\U30ee" | wc -L
    2
    $ printf "\U0041" | wc -L
    1

    For the examples above it works, it's possible to determine the number
    of required cells.

    But it doesn't work correctly for other subsets of characters, e.g. for
    the Smiley-characters I don't get the correct number (2) on my system.

    $ printf "\U1f600" | wc -L
    0

    I noticed that with a newer OS version the result is correct.

    $ printf "\U1f600" | wc -L
    2

    I want to fix the system files where these numbers are defined.[*]

    Q: Can anyone tell me where the character cell widths are defined?

    Thanks.

    Janis

    [*] I don't want to upgrade that system or selectively update files
    from a repository with all dependencies and possibly undesired effects.

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