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Having yesterday discussed the complexities involved in inclusive text I/O, what if our primary concern was simplicity? Without sacrificing inclusivity? Say for use during early boot?
Converting keyboard key-presses into ASCII is straightforward, & from there we can use a heavily-sandboxed script supplied via a full OS to convert into the user-relevant UTF-8.
Or failing that we could render a menu of valid UTF-8 codepoints.
1/3?
For auditory output we could play low-quality audio samples to spell the text out, though in that case wherever possible our bootloader should use SFX or prerecorded audio.
Since I'm dreaming lets imagine we voicecast Michaela Swee for this!
As for visual output... We'd need a font mapping char(s) to relatively-positioned images. Making this a monochrome raster font with a single size & style would simplify things.
I see no reason not to include ligatures & proportional text.
2/3!
Under the hood we could make the font a program running on our string-centric CPU, provided we know the available width ahead of time. The trick is to compress it well enough that we can afford to fit as complete a font as possible!
I'm imagining a run-length encoding similar to what the early Pokemon games used.
I've designed GPUs that can some the relative offsets & another to render those glyphs onscreen.
Meanwhile most devs simplify by ignoring all but ASCII, I object!
3/3 Fin!
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