Re: Encoding issues

From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Nov 03 2002 - 20:33:14 EST

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     --- Jordi Mas <jmas@softcatala.org> wrote:
    > Hello Andrew!
    >
    > > Hi Jordi. This code is better than some but it
    > > only works on all Windows builds at the moment
    > > because we don't yet support Windows Unicode
    > > builds (which we
    >
    > If we try to build native UNICODE builds (BTW, they
    > will only work on NT/2000/XP based systems) we will
    > need to change lots of things.

    Well not that many. I've already gone through the
    entire source and inserted a comment in every place
    which needs to change. Once we do all this we can
    make AbiWord a Unicode app on Windows and use the free
    Microsoft library to allow it to work properly on
    Windows 95/98/ME.

    > > badly need for many reasons). There is in fact no
    >
    > Which reasons? It's clear that is going to be faster
    > on NT based systems and it's better to use UNICODE
    > than 8-bit encoding, but why we need it badly?

    It's not possible to use one language's characters in
    another language's locale. This means running AbiWord
    with Yiddish strings on an English system will show
    lots of question marks. Unicode will fix this.
    It's not possible to work with Unicode filenames.
    Unicode will fix this.
    MS Word does all this properly and we don't.
    I'm pretty sure there are other reasons but these ones
    I consider more than enough.

    > In any case, we will need to keep building
    > non-unicode builds for a very long time.

    I don't think so though there's no reason to do both
    if people want to. MS Word and MS Internet Explorer
    have had a single version for many years. So does
    Mozilla.

    See these bug reports:
    http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1625
    "[RFE] NT GUI text should be Unicode"
    http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1635
    "Windows NT supports Unicode filenames"
    http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3655
    "Use Microsoft Layer for Unicode"

    > > guarantee that the Windows GUI will be using an
    > > 8-bit encoding, and many newly supported languages
    > > on Win32 *only* work in 16-bit Unicode!
    >
    > And they most likely do not work on win 9.x.

    Windows 9x isn't for sale any more.
    Supporting current and future versions of Windows
    doesn't mean dropping support for old versions of
    Windows - which seems to be the way you are reading
    it.

    > >
    >
    XAP_EncodingManager::get_instance()-getDefaultGUIEncodingName(),
    > > &uRead, &uWrite);
    >
    > I will look into this.

    Thanks Jordi. I really should have done this myself.
    Sorry for leaving it half-done ):

    Andrew.

    > Thanks,
    >
    >
    > --
    >
    > Jordi Mas
    > http://www.softcatala.org
    >
    >
    >
    >

    =====
    http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com

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