Subject: [pietsch@mail.uni-freiburg.de: International character support in Win98]
From: Sam TH (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 19 2000 - 18:08:45 CST
Forwarded from abiword-user
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam
GnuPG Key:
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/key
attached mail follows:
I found the the new version of Abiword today and was finally able
to download the Win32 binaries.
I find that Abiword has a problem communicating with the Windows
international keyboard support facility (internat.exe), and there
are a number of other issues about non-Ascii character support.
First, I can't use multiple keyboard layouts within Abiword. When
I start Abiword, the keyboard always switches back to my default
keyboard (German). Τhis is in principle legitimate for a Windows
application, though disappointing. But there is more: If during
an Abiword session I try to switch keyboard layout, the system
tray icon does report a successful change (changing its display
from "De" to, say, "Gr"). Αbiword then does recognize changes in
the layout of Ascii non-letter characters, but it keeps using
standard Ascii characters for the letter keys. There is no way of
getting characters outside the default system codepage typed in.
If an application really cannot support multiple keyboard layouts
(fair enough), then the requirement for a well-behaved Windows
app as far as I understand is that it should at least tell
internat.exe so, and explicitly reject the messages that
internat.exe sends out to it when a user requests a keyboard
change.
I saw a bug report about problems with Chinese IME support in
bugzilla, and a number of queries about international characters
on this list recently. Maybe the issues are related?
The second issue is about internal representation of non-Ascii
characters. The font selection dialog of Abiword has a dropdown
box for "script" (i.e. codepage), just as in the standard Windows
font "common dialog". The expected behavior would be that if I
enter, say, the German letter o-umlaut (hexF6 in cp1252), then
select it and change "script=Greek" in the font dialog, the
character should be displayed as a Greek letter phi (hexF6 in
cp1253). This doesn't happen. I can think of two possible
reasons: Either the internal representation of both letters in
Abiword is Unicode, in which case no transformation could (or
should) change the one character into the other anyway. In that
case the whole concept of "script" or "codepage" in a font dialog
seems out of place and the dropdown box should not be there at
all. (A choice of "encoding" might be a useful feature in a
save-file and open-file dialog, though.) Or, the function of that
dropdown box is not yet implemented.
Abiword also does not support the alternative Windows feature
whereby multiple-codepage fonts are provided by the Windows GDI
to "dumb" applications that do not themselves know about multiple
codepages. If I have a unicode font, say Times New Roman, and
specify the following lines in my Win.ini file:
[FontSubstitutes]
Times New Roman Greek,161=Times New Roman,161
then even the dumbest application ought to be able to use a Greek
(codepage cp1253) version of that font. In that case, the font
dialog ought to list "Times New Roman" and "Times New Roman
Greek" as two separate fonts, instead of giving an option to
chose a "script" within one font.
If I copy Greek characters from other applications or from the
Windows clipboard into Abiword in this way, they are always
interpreted as cp1252 (thus, a Greek phi is transformed into a
German o-umlaut.)
Since Abiword reportedly is a Unicode-aware application, I was a
bit disappointed to see that (outside the support of multiple
8-bit codepages, which will hopefully be functional some day)
there seems to be no Abiword-internal alternative way of entering
those Unicode characters that happen not to be in any of the
Windows codepages. MS Word has such a feature in its "insert
special characters" dialog. The Abiword "insert special
characters" feature apparently offers access only to those
truetype fonts that are marked as symbol fonts, and that means
only to the first 256 characters of each.
I must say I'm a bit disappointed. Unfortunately I'm not enough
of a programmer to help a lot, so I see myself sticking with
Microsoft Word again...
Maybe this should have gone to the abiword-developer list or to
bugzilla instead of this list. Can somebody of the people who
monitor this list please take care it's reported in the
appropriate place? Thanks,
Lukas
-----------------------------------------------------
Lukas Pietsch
University of Freiburg
English Department
Phone (p.) (#49) (761) 696 37 23
mailto:pietsch@mail.uni-freiburg.de
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