Subject: International support in Win98
From: Lukas Pietsch (pietsch@mail.uni-freiburg.de)
Date: Thu Dec 21 2000 - 12:20:23 CST
Mike Nordell wrote:
> I fixed input locale switching just a few minutes after I got
the > first forward of your post.
Good! If you guys are always as quick as that, I'll start to like
this project. :-)
This encourages me to raise a few more issues about i18n:
1) There's a problem not just with the keyboard but also with the
display. I finally managed to force-feed Abiword a few non-Latin
characters (by manually editing an abw source text outside
Abiword and then re-opening it.) Although Abiword is evidently
handling the characters quite correctly as Unicode internally,
they get displayed with the typical distortions that happen when
a string undergoes "WideCharToMultibyte" (some characters
replaced with "best-fit" Ansi ones, most others replaced with
question marks.)
I'm sure this isn't by design, is it? I can see that the strings
are internally "unsigned short UT_UCSChar", the drawing functions
use "ExtTextOutW", and there's absolutely no
"WideCharToMultibyte" lurking around anywhere in your code. So
this ought not to be happening, right? :-(
2) Are there any plans to switch to the uniscribe rendering
mechanism? You'd get some very pretty bidi support and complex
script rendering for your application free of charge. Or are you
planning to do that job yourselves?
3) Something entirely different: I noticed that Abiword is at a
loss when saving Unicode characters in LaTex format. Most
characters above 8bit are simply dropped. Of course, that's not
Abiword's fault but LaTex's - Unicode support is simply not
available in classical LaTex. But are you aware that there is now
an alternative: Omega? ( see
http://omega-system.sourceforge.net ) Omega is a 16bit enhanced
version of Tex which supports native Unicode input. Whenever a
document contains non-8bit characters, you could just save the
Latex files in UTF-8 and leave it to Omega to do all the rest.
Unfortunately Omega is little known and there is precious little
documentation for it. But it generally works with the same syntax
as LaTex, so it shouldn't be a big step to adapt. (And documents
containing only 8-bit could of course still be processed by
classical LaTex too).
4) A very minor i18n bug: The Windows installation program
assumes "C:\program files" to be the default installation path.
This path name is localized in Win9x (and customizable too). I
think the practice is to look up the value in the registry, under
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion,
"ProgramFilesDir", and then use that as a default.
Happy Christmas to all,
Lukas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Dec 21 2000 - 12:24:40 CST