Subject: Re: BiDi on Windows
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Fri Apr 06 2001 - 08:35:23 CDT
At 11:01 AM +0100 4/6/01, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>I am afraid I do not agree; I have no desire to run NT or ME, nor do I
>want to use localised 9x;
I agree about NT, ME and localized 9x - but Windows 2000 is a
keeper! I've been working with Windows (on and off) since 1.0, and
Win2K is the first version that I don't mind using on a day to day
basis.
>for one I need rtl support for Syriac, and
>there are no Syriac localised Windows.
No, but you should be able to input & display it on Win2K!
>I think in the Unicode age
>you should be, at least in principle, display anything that is covered
>by the Unicode charset without having to resort to 'special' versions
>of an OS;
I agree! The issue we are discussing is NOT display, but
input! I see now reason that we can't properly render a Unicode
document (assuming the fonts are present AND we have a way to map
Unicode to font glyphs) - BUT I don't expect that we can/should
provide input services w/o OS support.
>the MS localisation approach is, IMO, contraproductive,
>and prinicipally driven by commercial concerns.
Which is why it's not necessary on NT, 2K, XP.
>I am not suggesting we should reinvent user input methods, merely
>that we might want to consider allowing the user to input in a
>normal way characters that MS, in its great commercial wisdom,
>decided not to provide for.
That's reinventing input methods.
>All is required is to be able to map a key
>on the keyboard to an arbitrary Unicode value.
>
It's MUCH more complex than that - especially for CJK, and
even Arabic where you have to worry about contextual glyphs.
Leonard
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