Subject: Re: Problem with xkb
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Mon Sep 25 2000 - 01:57:32 CDT
On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Vlad Harchev wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Bubak wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Seems me and probably another russian programmer will correct this problem
> > in next two weeks, at least for unix - as for now it seems it's impossible to
> > enter any non-latin1 characters (or even non-ascii) into abiword.
> > Let's hope our changes will be integrated.
>
> We would LOVE to get non-Latin fonts going in Abiword. When you send in
> the patch tell me where to get your fonts and a few sample cryllic
> documents to test things with. If all goes well we should include Cryllic
> fonts in the distribution. As hackers with other font sets get their fonts
> sets working we'll incorporate them too.
My quick analysis of abiword and already existing hackish solution to allow
input of cyrillic in it brings the following notes and questions:
1) AW holds all characters in unicode. But currently the code works only for
latin1 symbols since there is no explicit recoding from/to encoding of
current locale, that is needed in following cases:
1.1) when text is typed in - the characters should be converted from
current locale encoding to unicode. Same when pastingfrom
clipboard.
1.2) when text is drawn out - the unicode text (from internal
representation) should be converted to text in current locale
so that XLib will choose correct glyphs from the font. Same for
cutting to clipboard.
1.3) The text that is input into dialogs like "Find" - it should also
be converted to unicode (so that unicode text will be searched
for, notin current locale's encoding).
1.4) When printing - unicode text should be converted to font's
encoding.
1.5) When exporting/importing - but that's another story.
For cyrillic and some other sripts that has few letters in them like english
(obviously, Japanese doesn't fall into this category) it could be much more
attractive to have internal prepresentation of the document contain text in
current locale's encoding (but still using wide characters). If you are going
to support all languages in the world, the text internally should be stored
in unicode, but all necessary conversions mentioned in 1.1 - 1.5 are
necessary.
As for fonts - since fonts are used both for display and printing, it's
impossible to have fonts that contains glyphs for letters for different
languages (like arabic, greek, cyrillic, latin). So, there is a need to
2.1) Provide separate font file of the same family for each
encoding/language used (the XLfds of these fonts will differ only
in last component - encoding name).
2.2) Make AW load only one font of the given family and style, with
encoding corresponding to current locale's encoding (i.e. from the
set of fonts with lfds differing only in last component the proper
one must be loaded - the one that corresponds to current locale).
2.3) When printing, text in internally used encoding should be
converted to text in font's encoding.
As for me - I'm going to implement most items listed (1.1 - 1.4 and 2.1 -2.3
and probably 1.5) and add cyrillic fonts in koi8-r encoding. Implementing
all this IMO will lead to correct support for input and display of text in
any language. Probably printing CJK (chinese, japanese, korean) texts won't
work since AW assumes that there are only 256 symbols in font encoding.
Any comments?
> Cheers
>
> Martin
>
> >
> > > Hi
> > > I installed abisuite 0.7.11 from an rpm
> > > (http://www.abisource.com/~sam/abisuite-0.7.11-1.i386.rpm) and when I try to
> > > switch keyboard via xkb or xkbmap, it crashes down. I tried also changing it
> > > under gnome. Also.
> > > Oh, it crashes not exactly during changing the keyboard, but when I start
> > > typing special slovak characters. When I import docs from MSword, there is
> > > no possibility to choose encoding of the font , even if I have installed the
> > > right fonts and they are functionable in other apps.
> > >
> > > Can U help me, or it's impossible to write text with diacritics in abiword ?
> > >
> > > Thanx
> > > bubo
> > >
> >
> > Best regards,
> > -Vlad
> >
> >
> >
>
Best regards,
-Vlad
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Sep 25 2000 - 02:12:08 CDT