A system for displaying Chinese character by use of a hardware circuit is completely compatible with the English text mode and can achieve the results of the Chinese-English mixed display without any software. The display speed of which is as fast as English and the memory occupied remains the same with no needs to be increased. Besides, there is an advantage that it will not share the processing time of the central processing unit (CPU) while displaying Chinese.

A teletext television receiver has a character memory comprising a common language set of characters and a plurality of sets of national option characters, each of which latter sets makes up a complete national language set when combined with the common language set. The totality of characters are arranged for addressing in two different modes. In one addressing mode, only one of the national option sets can be selected for page display as determined by control bits contained in the page header, so that the page can be only in one language. In the other addressing mode, all the national option sets can be selected for page display as determined by ghost row information of an acquired page, or locally by the receiver. This allows a display page to be in more than one language. FIGS. 3 and 4 show the code tables for the two addressing modes.

A selective call receiver displays messages in at least two scripts. The selective call receiver receives data including an address and a message to be displayed. A decoder decodes the data and recognizes a script select character therewithin. A memory stores at least two fonts corresponding to said at least two scripts, said scripts having different resolutions. A microcomputer is coupled to the decoder and the memory for selecting one of the fonts in response to the script select character, and a display is coupled to the microcomputer for displaying the message in the selected font.

Conventional bit-mapped address locations in a character oriented video random access memory (RAM) in which each character is represented by a bit mapping array comprised of ten lines each including eight pixels, or eight bits of information, in an X-Y matrix address organization are redefined in terms of the character and row address locations of a graphics oriented cathode ray tube controller for driving a video display. Groups of bits in the X-Y matrix address locations of the video RAM are shifted in a predetermined manner in generating a redefined, 1:1 mapping function addressing code which is provided to a cathode ray tube controller for driving the video display. A video RAM mapping module is provided for reorganizing the video RAM addresses and translating these addresses throughout the page of the video RAM in providing more efficient graphics mapping while retaining high resolution alphanumeric character video resolution. In one embodiment, a video display start bit is incremented by an 8-bit adder to provide for scrolling on a line-by-line basis without moving character bytes from one location to another in the video RAM.

A font display and text editing system is disclosed. The system includes a display medium for displaying text characters. A memory stores digital information describing the shape of each alphabetical character of a plurality of sets of alphabetical characters, each of the sets of alphabetial characters defining a respective font. An input device sequentially generates a first signal identifying one of the alphabetical characters as a base character and a second signal identifying a different one of the alphabetic characters as an overlay character. A circuit responsive to the signals displays the base and overlay characters as a single complex character on the display medium.