Subject: Insert Symbol, an apology
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Mon Apr 10 2000 - 15:38:35 CDT
[ From the never-take-a-weekend-off department. ]
I'm really glad to see the recent flurry of interest in getting Martin's
Insert Symbol work polished up and checked into the tree. I try to keep on
top of the barrage of patches and design discussions on this list, but that
takes a ton of work, and I don't always pull it off. :-(
It's been a while since I originally peeked at Martin's patches, but IIRC
correctly, the things which concerned me the most included:
1. Is there a plan for handling Unicode characters in this dialog? As far
as I can tell, the current solution just handles font-specific ASCII-like
encodings, which is likely to create compatibility problems when that
document gets exchanged.
If you look at the insert symbol dialogs in Word or NT, there are two
different capabilities offered:
a. insert any unicode character which exists in a given font
b. ignore encodings and just blindly insert an existing offset from a
particular Type 1 or TrueType font
In some cases, the latter option (b) may be unavoidable, since the font
encoding is effectively gibberish, so any time you have to substitute fonts
(for example when going to a different machine) you won't be able to read
that content at all.
Ideally, we'd be better off with option (a) where possible, since that way a
bullet is a bullet is a bullet.
2. Have the APIs been fixed to pass arguments safely and cleanly? I seem
to recall some weirdness about passing strings, as well as something about
usage of statics.
3. Is the XP/platform line drawn cleanly? How do the preview widgets work?
4. Finally, a total nit. Why are we passing the current font *down* into
the view? I can understand passing it the other way (up into the dialog),
but we don't do that either. I must be missing something here.
bottom line
-----------
My initial impression was that this patch would require some rewriting to
get it to work on other platforms, and I've continuously failed to find the
time to do so myself.
However, I definitely should have sent a more detailed version of this
feedback before now.
My apologies.
Paul
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