Re: commit: abi: UTF8String class

From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Apr 21 2002 - 21:51:21 EDT

  • Next message: Andrew Dunbar: "Re: commit: abi: UTF8String class"

     --- Tomas Frydrych <tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net>
    wrote: >
    > > Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote:
    > > Tomas, can you also clarify this point?
    > > I don't see why UTF-8 is unsuitable for the
    > piecetable.
    > I want the piecetable and layout engine to be
    > optimised for speed;
    > variable character width requires extra processing,
    > that's why I do
    > not think it is a good encoding to use here.

    I want the piecetable and layout engine to work for
    all the world's languages. Being optimized for speed
    is also good. I won't sacrifice #1 for #2.
    Microsoft Word handles these things well. I am not
    interested in working on a Word Processor that does
    not try to equal and beat Microsoft Word.

    > > UTF-8 has another advantage over UTF-32. In the
    > gtk & the qnx
    > > frontend, the format used to output text is UTF-8,
    > so we'll not need
    > > to do any conversion to get text displayed. win32
    > uses UTF-16/UCS-2
    > > (in funcion of the registry?) so anyway you need
    > to do a conversion
    > > from UTF-8 or UCS-4 to UCS-2.
    > We need to make a distinction between the GUI (the
    > menus and
    > dialogues, etc) and the main editing space. We are
    > going to
    > implement the main editing space using FreeType,
    > which means
    > we will not use any calls to the native text drawing
    > routines.
    > FreeType API uses unsigned long for Unicode
    > characters. For the
    > GUI we will need to use what-ever the OS requires,
    > and here I
    > agree that UTF-8 is the logical way to store the
    > static strings.

    Well maybe FreeType, maybe Pango. The Gnome guys
    definitely want us to use Pango:
    http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/1016233970/1016357145/1016387936/addPostingForm

    Andrew Dunbar.

    > Tomas

    =====
    http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com

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