Subject: multi-lingual support under Unix
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Sat Dec 30 2000 - 08:10:50 CST
I would like to pretty much the same capabilities that Kevin
mentioned; essentially I want my menus to be based on my locale,
but to be able to use any number of different languages to create
my documents.
What we will need is some kind of keyboard switching mechanism
that would allow to translate keyboard input into appropriate
unicode values based on a language/keyboard the user chooses.
Whether this should be done using calls to the system/Xserver, or
whether we should build it all into AbiWord I am not entirely sure,
but even building from scratch should not be too complicated (I will
look into this).
The other thing that would be most desirable is to get rid off the
$prefix/fonts directory altogether and let AW use any fonts served
by the font server *including* TTF fonts. I realise that printing with
ttf fonts is a problem on Unix, but I think we should consider
whether we really cannot find a way to do this. The XFree 4.0 has
the FreeType engine built in, so that ttf fonts are easy to use with
the screen (not that it was that difficult before XFree 4), and if we
can 'print' it on the screen, we have, at least in theory, all the
information we need to print it anywhere (as much as I do not like
Windows, the idea that a printer and screen are pretty much the
same thing makes life so much simpler).
Tomas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Dec 30 2000 - 08:15:35 CST