octablitter

[EnronEvolved]

There's a proposal that seems to have been approved by the UTC, that adds a pretty substantial Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement block, including new block elements and box drawing characters. If notcurses can blit braille, it should be pretty easy to adapt it to use the block octants in the proposal.

The separated sextants and quadrants may have their uses too. What do you reckon?

[dankamongmen]

as far as i'm aware, sextants were added in Unicode 13's Symbols for Legacy Computing, and we're using them in the "sexblitter". quadrants were added long ago (unicode 4?), and we've supported them with "quadblitter" for several years. the discussed "octants", however, could be useful if they're approved.

one problem with this is that while you get the higher resolution--kinda--you can't just go using e.g. eight different colors for an octant glyph. you only ever have two available. the more "pixels" you try to force in there, the more color smudging you might have to do. thus to make use of the "higher-resolution" semigraphics, you lose color fidelity.

if octants get added, i'll add them to the generalized dankblitter.

closing this for now. if they get added, i'll add a new bug. thanks for your interest!

[PhMajerus]

Octants have been approved for publication in Unicode 16.0:
https://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html
(The octants are set at U+1CD00 to U+1CDE5, as well as two new required quadrants at U+1FBE6 and U+1FBE7 that are reused for octants.)

You can also track their inclusion in Cascadia Code using the following issue: microsoft/cascadia-code#711

[dankamongmen]

i saw this the other day! awwww shit, awww shit.

as i note above, though, you get more "resolution" but you lose color accuracy. sextants were not nearly as much of an improvement over quadrants as i had hoped, despite being more computationally intensive.