Subject: Re: BiDi on Windows - was it tested?
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Wed Apr 04 2001 - 14:11:32 CDT
There is one particular aspect of the keyborad magic that will need
to be considered. We can fully support bidi on Windows with no
built-in bidi support, e.g., regular English Windows. Unfortunately,
the international keyboard utility that comes with English windows
(at least win 9x) does not have Hebrew or Arabic layouts, so that I
cannot type in these languages. The same will be probably true for
the CJK languages, i.e., we will be able to display them under
English Windows, but not create documents containing them.
I am not sure what the best way around this would be. I believe that
a keyborad driver for each language is stored in a separate DLL,
and it should be possible to create and distribute suplementary
modules with Abi for any such languages, providing these DLLs are
somewhere documented (I have looked for some documentation on
these a few years back, without success). Alternatively, we could
build a keyboard utility into Abi, one that would be only turned on
for the languages that are not supported by Windows, but that
does not feel as a good solution to me. Anyway, I will leave this to
the Win guys to ponder one day ...
Tomas
> Dom
> I saw these tests. To be *extremely* specific, Word2000 remapped some glyphs
> - i.e. pressing 'k' turned into a specific hebrew character, as did all of
> the keys on the keyboard. For abi, pressing 'k' gave you 'k'. But you could
> input the charcters from the insert symbol dialog thus producing the
> intended effect.
>
> >> I was warned that the AW bidi handling might clash with the Win bidi
> >>support (effectively cancelling each other out).
> >
> > I don't believe the problem is in BiDi, I think it's a
> >general non-Roman language issue. For example, has anyone tested our
> >CJK support on Windows??
>
> It's most certainly not a conflict. It basically amounts to "some keyboard
> magic needs to happen and isn't happening." And CJK will probably barf on
> Win32 until some changes are done to the encoding manager and graphics
> classes.
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