Subject: Re: multi-lingual support under Unix
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Sat Dec 30 2000 - 11:42:10 CST
On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>
> 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.
If all you need is to type documents in some language and see all interface
in english, run AW as following:
LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R LC_MESSAGES=en_US abiword
This will allow you to input russian and latin, while having all user
interface in English. Or add
export LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R
export LC_MESSAGES=en_US
to your .bashrc and all apps will speak english but will allow entering
russian, or hack your AbiWord wrapper to set $LC_MESSAGES to en_US.
> 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).
User has just to configure X server properly - no special means from AW
needed.
> 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).
There is XPrint extension (included in XFree 4 by default, but not included
into XF-3.x) that allows to use X API for printing - just like on windows.
Dunno whether gdk functions will work nice with it - but it should with few
efforts.
But please don't assume that every AW user has ability to run XFree 4 - AW
can run under AIX, Irix and other unixes which can't run XFree86 at all, and
also not all drivers from XFree86-3.x has been ported to XF-4 (driver for S3s
I use included) - so XF-4 is not a dominant on Linux. So forget about XPrint
extension, availability of XF-4 etc.
Printing TTF fonts is not a problem under Unix at all. If ghostscript is
used, than AW can include a TTF font in the .ps being generated (Postscript
standard describes all details), or even don't include font body if that font
is registered in Ghostscript Fontmap (that's more preferred apporach). The
later is how CJK text is printed under unix on non-gnome build.
So, there are no printing-specific and font-specific problems at all
(including printing of TTFs). All of them can be solved in a couple of days.
> Tomas
>
Best regards,
-Vlad
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