PuTTY wish bidi-unicode14

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summary: Unicode and bidi support updated to Unicode 14.0.0
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
fixed-in: b8be01adca7f9b70d04cbd967628136398a7abaa (0.77)

As of PuTTY 0.77, the in-built Unicode support has been brought up to date with Unicode 14.0.0.

One effect of this is that the terminal will recognise newly added characters as having their correct terminal width. For example, U+0487 was not previously recognised as a zero-width combining character, and now it is.

A larger effect is that the built-in support for bidirectional text in the terminal has been rewritten to support the updated version of the official Unicode bidi algorithm. Specifically, PuTTY now implements UAX#9 revision 44, and passes the complete Unicode 14.0.0 bidirectional text conformance suite.

One particular effect of this is that numbers next to right-to-left text are no longer erroneously reversed. A specific example is that if you run the following Unix command

echo -e '12 A \xD7\x90\xD7\x91 B'
then previously you would see the resulting line of text in the terminal beginning with the digits 21, because they had been wrongly reversed as a side effect of the Hebrew letters represented by those hex escapes. Now the Hebrew letters still appear (correctly) in right-to-left order, but the digits at the start of the line are left-to-right.

Note: this is unrelated to font support for particular Unicode characters. In order to display a character successfully in the terminal, PuTTY is still dependent on there being a font on the system that contains that character. So if you want to use a character from Unicode 14 and your fonts don't include it, it still won't display correctly. (But PuTTY will at least know better about where it ought to appear on the screen and how many character cells it should take up.)


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Audit trail for this wish.
(last revision of this bug record was at 2022-05-15 14:15:31 +0100)