lmc@cisden.UUCP (Lyle McElhaney) (11/22/85)
Last week I put a note on the net describing the line-drawing character set that I had been using with termcap. Since then I have received from Mark Horton a copy of the terminfo caps, and I would like to withdraw the set that I proposed in deference to the terminfo set. The only real difference (besides simply the names) is that rather than define each line-drawing character separately (top left corner, vertical line, etc) a single string is defined which consists of pairs of characters. The first character of each pair is the character that causes one of the line drawing characters on a vt100; the second is the character that causes it on the terminal in question. The appropriate string for a vt100, itself, then is: ac=``jjkkllmmnnqqttuuvvwwxx (that covers the diamond and the 11 line drawing characters; the other vt100 special characters could be covered too, but they may not mean much on another terminal.) The other caps are: as - the string that introduces the l-d set (known as the "alternate" character set); ae - string to close use of the laternate character set; aE - enables the alternate character set - ie, makes the line-drawing set *be* the alternate set, as opposed to, say, a Danish or other language character set. At one time I thought that a single string for the line-drawing set might be a good idea, but I didn't know whether there were any terminals that needed more than a single character to draw a single l-d character. I guess there aren't, and Mark is certainly one to know if there were. At any rate, I've set these into my set of termcaps, and I hope that they'll get accepted into the official termcap definition. Lyle McElhaney ...hao!cisden!lmc