Re: Pictogram specification

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 4:51 PM, David Glaude <[email protected]> wrote:
> I believe that by offering a set of standard pictogram that are likely
> to be fakely present in most driver, it will attract the usage of that
> new feature. Then it will benefit to those with physical pictogram.
>
> What do you think?

I agree.  Pictograms are currently of intense interest with the
media-center-centric display crowd and not as interesting to those of
us who have "straight text" displays.  If the pictographic
specification allows for text displays to emulate pictograms in a way
that's fairly client-neutral, then there may be increased interest by
all.

I myself did some work extending the xmms client to add 4 digits of
bignums to display the year from the ID3 tag if there was enough
screen real estate for them (8x24 and 4x40 and similar), so I
certainly did use my displays to run a music player, and I would have
found it interesting to have been able to support pictographic
controls other than by ASCII approximations or random characters from
the graphic side of the display's ROM character set.

One concept I had years ago was, for graphical displays, supporting
16x16 or 32x32 images from a canned list - one application would be to
show the weather report textually on one side of the screen and an
image of a sun or cloud or raindrop or snowflake on the other.  I am
not aware of any weather-centric displays, but that could be a good
one to emulate.  The client could ask the driver (of whatever display)
if it supported meteorology pictograms and use them in a WeatherBug or
METAR client.  One could emulate that in a 2x2 block of custom chars
on an HD44780 or use bitmaps (compiled-in or added via config lines)
for full graphical displays, or via whatever means on yet other types
of displays.  One could even do ASCII art on a 4x20, dedicating, say,
a 4x5 textual patch for a pictogram.  You could fit 4 of them
side-by-side, or use just one and have 4x15 left over for commentary
text, running times, or whatever.

In my own work, pictograms of weather, system status/load, and media
playback are interesting.  Others will have their own favorites.

-ethan