[fpc-pascal] Pseudographics in FPC-IDE

[Anton Shepelev]

Hello all,

I  have installed FPC on a Linux machine to find that in the
virtual terminal (true text-mode,  not  GUI-based  emulator)
FP-IDE  does not dispaly pseudographics correctly. It turned
out that changes to the SFM (Screen Font Map)  doesn't  have
any effect inside the IDE, and I count'd understand why.

Then, in the WIKI I found this:

    On a terminal with VGA character set (currently only the
    Linux console), the video unit will enable the VGA char-
    acters and use them without translation.

which answered my question.

My  console  is in UTF8 mode, using an ISO8859-1 font, while
the FP-IDE, as it seems, is accessing pseudographics symbols
directly  by  glyph  number  (and  bypassing the SFM table),
expecting them to be at locations  specified  in  the  CP437
encoding:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP437

which  means  that  it  will  only work with a CP437-encoded
font.

Why was this done and is there a workaround except re-encod-
ing the console font into CP437?

Thanks in advance,
Anton