Subject: Re: Unix font warning -- CJK-related...
From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Dec 13 2001 - 06:19:43 CST
--- Anthony Fok <anthony@thizlinux.com> wrote: >
Hello Tomas,
>
> Oh, BTW, I have been testing AbiWord under several
> different locales
> (LANG=C, LANG=zh_TW.Big5, LANG=zh_CN.GB2312, etc.)
> and briefly glancing
> through the source code. Currently, AbiWord can
> only display text that is
> within the locale in which AbiWord is started,
> otherwise it is replaced by
> \xBO. However, since AbiWord already stores all
> text as Unicode internally,
> what strikes me is that AbiWord is *so-close* to
> actually be able to display
> _all_ text in the document regardless of the locale
> it was started in,
> just like OpenOffice and Microsoft Word.
>
> What I mean is this: instead of just reading the
> font subdir of the current
> locale, let's read them all in (e.g. zh-TW, zh-CN,
> ja, ko). A character
> cannot be found in the Big5 encoding? Let's try
> GB2312. Not there? Let's
> try ja-JP. Good, it's there, so let's get that
> glyph from that Japanese
> font. Is it possible? (Or is it already on your
> todo list? :-)
This is all a problem only on X as I guess everybody
understands it works fine under Windows.
I'm not sure if you're talking about font-sets here
or more probably font-substitution. Do we want Abi to
be able to take characters from a font other than the
currently-selected font? MSWORD does seem to do this
under some circumstances at least but we would have to
figure out a bunch of rules as this is a murky area.
For instance when you select a character which is
being displayed via this mechanism, do we show the
current font as being the font the document specified
for the character or the font Abi resorted to to get
the character to display? And if we then save the
file what font do we mark it as? Then there's the
whole issue of trying to pick as similar a font as
possible - or at least not an utterly different one.
This would be useful in some circumstances for any
language, not just CJK, for instance displaying
foreign
characters, or IPA characters in my case.
I'm sure some of the developers wouldn't want to go
down this path at all. It's not simple like it
sounds.
Andrew Dunbar.
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net
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