From: Andrew Haylett <ajh@gec-mrc.co.uk> Subject: selection 1.3: problem with 8-bit characters Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1992 08:42:45 GMT
[this message is partly a response to email from Pasi Rikala, but I couldn't
mail back to him, and the problem may be of more general interest, anyway...]
selection doesn't work well with 8-bit characters for a simple reason.
Characters for the paste buffer are copied direct from screen memory, ie.
after output translation. This works fine for characters < 128, since no
translation is done (at least with normal translation enabled). However, when
pasting characters > 128 (in ISO-Latin 1 mode), or some characters < 128 (in
VT00 graphics mode), the mapped characters from the IBM character set, instead
of those originally sent to the console driver, are pasted back into the
tty input buffer.
Since the mapping from ISO-Latin to PC charset is M to N, where M > N, the
reverse mapping can't be done by the selection mechanism. Anybody got any
bright ideas to work around this? Meanwhile, don't expect selection to work
with mapped characters.