report on status of AW's i18n patch


Subject: report on status of AW's i18n patch
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Tue Sep 26 2000 - 14:31:49 CDT


 Today I promised that I will post preview of this patch tonight.
Unfortunately, I didn't complete it yet.
 Things that are already done:

1) Added ability to input keys with keysyms > 256, with converting of keysym
  values to unicode
2) Remappinng of characters from unicode to X Locale for in remapGlyph for
   drawing and printing them.
3) Fixed printing. Only single-byte characters are supported.
4) Fixed cutting and pasting - pasting to/from other apps works well now.
5) Slightly enhanced export to latex by supporting the emitting of
  \usepackage[<LANGUAGE_LIST>]{babel} and \usepackage[<texencoding>]{inputenc}
6) Corrected importing of RTFs. The following constucts
        {\f1\froman\fcharset2{\*\fname Symbol;}MT Symbol;}
  in \fonttbl are now supported (i.e. canonical name of the font inside of {})
  These constructs are produced by at least Win95 russian edition. They were
  crashing AW (RTFstate stack underflow).
7) RTF import: Added recoding of characters of form "\'e1" from windows
  codepage to unicode.
  With 6) and 7) I was able to import any RTFs I can find/produce by WordPad
  from W95 and by Word2000 (with various output options).

What's missing:
8) As you've may noticed I'm having problems with finding out how to export
  unicode characters with value > 0x7f to Word97. I hope that someone will
  suggest solution.

Notes:
* As for RTF export (I didn't tweak it at all): exporting to RTF is the only
 way to import anything international from AW into Word97. But Wordpad (and
 probably Word95) doesn't understand characters in form of \uc0\uUUUU
 It seems it will be very hard produce RTFs understood by everything since
 there will be need to find out Windows' codepage for given locale - so I
 won't do it.

* There can be problems with providing localized UI strings like menu items
for non-latin2 languages, since different encodings are used on Windows and
Unix (for example, russian language - cp1251 on Windows and koi8-r on Unix,
same for other slavic languages, poland, etc.). So, there should be means for
specifying a charset of translated strings and charset used for that language
for each platform and some tool for recoding at compile time to the
target platform's charset (libiconv provides one utility as I remember - named
'iconv'). This seems to be easily doable since gnu tools are sued for building
on each platform, and grepping and for some special comment and extracting it
and using that recoding utility will be simple. I'm not going to implement all
this.

 Comments are appreciated.

 Best regards,
  -Vlad



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