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Re: [paragui-users] Full UNICODE support
From: |
Teunis Peters |
Subject: |
Re: [paragui-users] Full UNICODE support |
Date: |
Tue, 11 Feb 2003 17:55:34 -0800 (PST) |
On 12 Feb 2003, Kamil Skalski wrote:
> Well, I didn't get answer about Unicode support in ParaGUI, so I took
> the effort to get through FreeType and ParaGUI code. And then I've
> managed that ParaGUI lacks it at all. I really need this feature, so I
> played a little bit with code.
> So far I've changed text display (FontEngine class) to support UTF8.
I for one am VERY interested. I've been working on the OpenGL branch -
which uses an entirely different rendering approach. (it actually isn't
opengl requiring - it's just setup to support different rendering engines
including an opengl one)
As I work (sometimes) in a mix of English, French, German, Japanese and
the occasional throw-in Chinese (trad, I'm not up on modern at all),
Unicode support was one of those things I was still looking into.
Issues I've noticed:
Do strings stay in UTF8 format? (useful but not the only way)
Layout rules
- eg. left-to-right/right-to-left/top-to-bottom,compressed
(Korean can be 'compressed' where multiple sounds make up
a character)
- Input methods (most Unix ones are X-specific, more the pity)
- font caching (any ideas here?) for LARGE fonts
and related:
- font caching - for quick display rather than rendering every
character individually as the current system (opengl branch
anyways) does.
What do you mean by Unicode support btw? UCS-4, UCS-2, UTF-16, UTF-8
encodings? Wide character support?
As far as I know, outside of tricky layouts and rendering, UTF8 should be
the easiest format to leave strings in though. And it's compatible with
most existing C (and especially C++) libraries. Also the added silly that
linux filenames can be encoded in UTF8....
I was approaching a 'pango' driver for handling text layout - but pango
only seems to operate with X - and breaks in FBcon badly.
Does that cover things clearly enough? (these are just my thoughts and
goals on this topic :)
G'day, eh? :)
- Teunis Peters