[Adonthell-devel] SDL 1.3 and text input

[Kai Sterker]

Getting sidetracked again ...

One bit of fallout from setting up a fresh build environment on OSX
10.6 were strange noises whenever pressing non-printable keys. Appears
that recent SDL 1.3 has finally implemented unicode support on OSX,
which leads to the problem. See here for more details:

http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/2010-January/074201.html

After a week of silence, I've finally gotten some answers (although I
think I will have to follow up some more with this). Anyway, I went
and tested our SDL 1.3 input code more thouroghly and found it not
working properly at all. So this evening I've started fixing things
and have so far some pretty good results when running test/inputtest.
The input field in test/guitest does not work at all right now.
However, I didn't have any time to look into that.

I also couldn't test my changes to the SDL 1.2 backend, so it might
not even compile.

In general, the gui code will have to be updated to work with UTF-8
encoded strings. That means updating the text input field and then the
text rendering in the font class. There also might be changes required
to the line wrapping of multiline labels. There's some code in the 0.3
branch to borrow and it might be nice to add that as a utf8 helper
class to the base module.

The other part to be done is testing and completing the SDL 1.2 input
backend, which needs to convert whatever SDL 1.2 returns into UTF-8
too. Again, I think there's code in 0.3 for that.


It's late now and I have no more time to follow up on all this
tonight. If somebody feels like finishing the open items above, please
go ahead. Best if you're still on SDL 1.2 for that, as the 1.3 backend
itself should be the only thing that I'd consider working. If nobody
steps up, I'll dedicate some more time to that stuff, but I wouldn't
be disappointed if I didn't have to.

Kai

P.S: Another thing I hopefully don't get sidetracked with is an
overhaul of the SDL 1.3 gfx backend. Right now it's still using the
1.2 compatibility layer, which means it won't benefit from the
performance boost SDL 1.3 could provide otherwise. Volunteers welcome!