News

• iterm page(this one) is created(9 Jan 2003)
• iterm version 0.5 is released(29 Dec 2002). see Release notes. get iterm version 0.5 from here

What is iterm?
This is a platform-independent framework for making Internationalized Virtual Terminal Emulator. Implementing platform-dependent part of this framework, you can easily build internationalized virtual terminal/Widget. You can obtain latest .tar.gz package from following URL..

• http://www-124.ibm.com/linux/projects/iterm/

or latest codes from CVS Repository as below..

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.openi18n.org:/cvsroot login
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.openi18n.org:/cvsroot co iterm 
	

or

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.li18nux.org:/cvsroot login
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.li18nux.org:/cvsroot co iterm 
	

Overview
The iterm is the multi-platform capable I18N terminal emulator, based on the Model-View-Controller(MVC) architecture. The MVC model provide portabilty and consistency among terminal emulators, including framebuffer based Console.

Here is the architectural diagram of iterm.

   frame     Athena   gtk+ based   Qt based   Other
   buffer    Widget    GNOME         KDE     Widget
    i18n    based X   termianl     terminal   based
   console  terminal                         terminal
  +--------+---------+-----------+----------+--------+
  |        | xiterm  |GNOMEiterm | KDEiterm | *iterm |
  |fbiterm +---------+-----------+----------+--------+
  |        |libXiterm|libgtkiterm|libQtiterm|etc.....|
  +--------------------------------------------------+
  |                     libiterm                     |
  +--------------------------+                       |
  | Pluggable BiDI engine SPI|                       |
  +---------+-------+--------+-----------------------+
  |Sun PLS  |IBM PLS|FriBiDi |
  |liblayout|       |        |
  +---------+-------+--------+
	

The foundation of the I18N terminal emulator "libiterm" implements the "View" independent core I18N terminal emulator capability, including BiDi support. The libiterm includes pluggable BiDi engine SPI. At this moment, Sun's opensourced PLS library(liblayout), IBM PLS library, and FriBiDi are supported.(At this moment, only libiterm, fbiterm, libXiterm and xiterm are available).

Screen Shots
Here is a screenshot of xiterm: an Athena widget implementation of iterm. This xiterm runs with IBM PLS library for BiDi engine and IIIM X Client Framework(IIIMXCF) for Input Method Framework. You'll see multiple languages are input/ouput simultaneously on UTF-8 locale. xiterm also works on legacy locales, such are ja_JP.eucJP/SJIS or ko_KR.euckr or zh_CN.gb2312 and so on, without any modification and any additional codeset converters.

First several lines are output demos using locale data. You can see Arabic and Hebrew texts are layouted. Next few lines are not exactly xiterm capability but, good example of internationalized shell globbing. Sepcial character '?' matches a character but not a byte. And latin capital 'E' and greek cpaital epsilon are distinguished. Finally several scripts are input by IIIMXCF on command line.

Below is a screen shot of fbiterm: a Linux framebuffer implementation of iterm. This fbiterm runs with IBM PLS library for BiDi engine and is implemented input method. The input method implementation is very experimental stage and not yet merged into CVS repository. This implementation is done with very alpha stage of IIIM Client Framework(IIIMCF), which is on development. IM enabled version of fbiterm is released after IIIMCF completion. fbiterm is just like xiterm and run on any locales. This is the screenshot fbiterm runs on UTF-8 locale.

Reporting bugs/Discussion
Bug report of iterm are mainly accepted on li18nux-utildev, on which also discussion about iterm are held. Please refer the following URL for joining the list.

• http://www.openi18n.org/ml/