This is an old revision of the document!

= Unicode FreeBSD is a great platform for many multilingual tasks. What can be done to make it even better? == Fonts Having enough fonts in ports to display any wikipedia article may be considered the first milestone. As a test case, rendering http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias in Firefox should be enough. As of 19 May 2008 it seems only Sinhalese is missing, but it is readily available and should be ported soon.

Ideally, fonts in ports should provide as much Unicode coverage as currently possible. Maximum-coverage meta-ports may then be created (possibly divided per Unicode planes) for users to get comprehensive Unicode environment quickly and easily.

Another option to pursue is free fonts. For example, much of Unicode coverage is currently exclusively provided by x11-fonts/code2000, which is shareware. Likewise, x11-fonts/webfonts license is quite restrictive. The situation where considerable coverage is only available under non-free license conditions is undesirable for many users.

deskutils/gucharmap is a good tool to check what scripts are supported by the fonts installed on your machine. x11-fonts/fntsample can produce PDF documents showing coverage of any TTF font. It can also compare coverages of two different fonts. == Rendering As with fonts, rendering wikipedia languages correctly may be considered the first goal. Unlike fonts, rendering depends more on particular applications. Popular web browsers are a good choice for testing, but other programs are equally important. An X11 terminal with full support of Unicode rendering is an important milestone. Currently at least xterm and rxvt-unicode have issues displaying some wikipedia languages (e.g. Gothic script). == Input

• x11
• x11 terminals
• console

== Other issues It has long been pointed out that FreeBSD has problems with low-level (libc?) support for Unicode. It would be great if a person knowledgeable in the area could rehash the issues here.