User customizable BITMAPS

[AlanDeSmet]

Users may have a variety of reasons for wanting a different set of BITMAPS:

• User wants to use new characters not yet known to TIV. (I'm really looking forward to the Teletext block mosaic and smooth mosaic terminal graphics characters)
• User is using a font that doesn't yet support some of the characters TIV uses.
• User is using a font with some unusually shaped characters, such that different bit patterns work better.

My broad proposal is to allow the user to create a configuration file with an alternative set of characters and bit maps. Probably available at a well known location ($XDG_DATA_HOME/tivrc falling back to $HOME/.tivrc?), perhaps overridable via environment variable or command line?

For simplicity, I don't propose doing anything clever like trying to merge user configuration with the built-in configuration; it's all or nothing.

A command line option to create a default configuration file from the built-in configuration is probably necessary in practice.

In the longer term, tools to help create the file would be useful, but are probably best left to a later. Possibilities I see:

• Automatically probing which characters exist for a given font. Tools like fc-list 'FONTNAME:style=Regular' charset, fc-list -v 'FONTNAME:style=Regular', or hb-shape PATH/TO/FONT '┣'
• Given enough information about a terminal (at the very least, how to find the character at 0,0), an automatic set of bit patterns could be generated.

[stefanhaustein]

SGTM, any config file format suggestions? Just a list of pair of uint_32 per line (codepoint and bitmap)?