(no subject)

Subject: (no subject)
From: oldo (oldo@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE)
Date: Fri Apr 27 2001 - 19:37:37 CDT

Hello,

[my name is oliver, call me oldo, i am a linguist, teacher and software
 developer and Debian/GNU/GPL enthusiast.]

there was an external Non-member submission from Markus Kuhn
<Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk> concerning unicode (utf-8) support
in Abiword.

I think the topic is really important to make Abiwords international
and long-term success even bigger.

Markus is the maintainer of the Unicode-UTF8-FAQ for GNU/Linux platforms.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

I don't want to speak for him here, but I like the way he advocates for
standard compliance (backed on his insigth knowledge in many relevant
areas).

A qoute from his E-Mail follows: 

--
Markus Kuhn wrote to AbiWord Dev <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
with respect to input methods:

[..]

Please have a look at:

  ISO/IEC 14755:1997, Information Technology -- Input methods to enter
  characters from the repertoire of ISO/IEC 10646 with a keyboard or
  other input devices

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/ISO-14755.pdf

The basic input method it defines is to hold Shift+Control while
entering a hexadecimal number, in order to enter an arbitrary UCS code.

You could implement this in Abiword, but I'd rather like to see this
instead (or in addition) implemented in the X11 Xlib input method
mechanics. Stuff like the entry of UCS characters should be provided by
the OS or GUI in a standard way for all applications. It is not
something that every application should have to reinvent independently.
We are getting there, but only slowly.

In XFree86, we have also established the convention that UCS character
U-xxxxxx corresponds to X11 keysym 0x01xxxxxx. If you process keysyms
directly, you should support this convention. Alternatively, switch into
a UTF-8 locale and XmbLookupString will provide you with the same
functionality (in XFree86 so far only, but hopefully X.Org will pick this
up in R6.6.1 as well).

For more information:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#x11

Have you seen that all the X11 standard fonts are now available in
ISO10646-1?

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

All these will also ship with XFree86 4.1 soon.

I haven't looked at Abiword yet, but I keep a list of Unicode-aware
Linux applications in my Unicode on Linux FAQ on

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

and it would be nice if someone knowledgeable could contribute a brief
statement about the current state of UCS support in Abiword.

If you are interested in Unicode under Unix/Linux, I'd highly recommend
that you join the linux-utf8 and i18n@xfree.org mailing lists:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#lists

Markus

--
# end of qoute

thanks!
oldo

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