Re: Pictogram specification

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Markus Dolze <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello LCDproc Developers,
>
> during the past months Stefan Herdler, Wolfgang Hauck, and myself discussed
> how to implement pictograms in LCDproc.

Excellent to hear.

> We appreciate any comments from the community.

What I see looks good so far.  I don't have any modules with
pictograms so I can't test it myself but I'm in favor of supporting
this feature without the "output() hack".

Is there any thought to implementing "virtual pictograms" inside of a
driver?  It wouldn't affect the pictogram spec as discussed, but one
could have programmable character pictograms or even ASCII constructs
that may or may not be implemented by various displays,  As a
practical example, I'm thinking of "degrees C" and "degrees F" that
_some_ textual displays have in their ROM-based character sets and
some do not.  The idea is that a client app could query, say, the
HD44780 driver and it _might_ know (via .ini file options, perhaps)
what pictogram name to respond to and what ASCII hex character would
display that "pictogram".

The most significant difference I can see is that a textual display
with hardware-implemented pictograms don't have an X-Y coordinate for
them.  They are on or off wherever the glass has the electrodes.  For
a "virtual pictogram", if you wanted to place a "degrees F" next to a
temperature, you'd need a way to tell the driver _where_ to put that.

Is this viable or does this expand the scope too far?

-ethan