Subject: Re: ABIWORD wxWINDOW and FLTK INTEGRATION
From: Sanyaade (sanyaade@btinternet.com)
Date: Mon Dec 03 2001 - 19:27:23 CST
Hi everybody,
Good day to you all at Abiword. I am at a verge of incorporating wxWindow and FLTK into the current/future version of Abiword that I have just downloaded and built.
1.) My Question is -> Is this OK and "Acceptable"?
a) If No! please kindly tell me in a nut-shell why?
b) If yes! Or Ok! Please let me know if there are rules to follow and how to go about doing this in your already laid out way.
c) Any other information or help that you can give will be well appreciated. Thanks!!!
Why do I want to do these? Well I been on it for the past weeks. The problems of being able to display menu-text (e.g. &File, &Edit, &Help....) and other menu and sub-menu items text in foreign languages that are not
currently supported by the operating system like Microsoft Windows. It came
to a point that I can't take it no more and ask the questions why that menu text are system dependent?
Why can't those languages not supported by the Windows operating systems being able to display their user-interfaces in their languages in a Window or some Windows without affecting other Windows?
Those languages (e.g. most African languages like Yoruba, Ibo, Lucumi, Hausa and most Asian languages are not supported by Microsoft Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000 and even the so called World Enabled XP by Microsoft. These languages are currently at disadvantages of having user-interface display in their native dialect/language. Please don't blame Microsoft since it is the market that dictate whether a language will be enabled in certain MS-O/S or not. I won't blame MS since It has to pay programmers for living.
So my research showed that it is possible to achieve the point raised above. I have used some packages like FLTK, FOX, V, ZINC and wxWindow. Out of all it is only with wxWindow that I am able to achieve these objectives extremely very close. The only problem at moment is at Top level menu (e.g. &File, &Edit...etc) but the other menu-items and controls can be translated into any World language with ease without rely on the OS but with supplied localised font(s). I will like to mention that with a hacked version of FLTK-> FLUID, I was able to do top-level menu in foreign language with a supply font/localised font(s).
May I let you know that the font(s) do not need to be hard-coded into ABIWORD, it can be read from a .ini file, registry, .po files, Abiword string file(just like other Western-European/Cyrillic languages that don't have the problem outline above since they already O/S supported via codepage/encoding).
Please everybody kindly reply to this email and let me know how all feel.
Any suggestion, advice, pointers, correction... etc.... Will be highly welcome.
Thanks in Anticipation and God blesses!!!
Best Regards to you all!!!
Sanyaade
sanyaade@btinternet.com
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