Re: win32 Unicode support

Hello Tomas,

> I have been looking into bug 1314, and we really need to start behaving
> as a Unicode application. We either need to start requiring the
> unicows.dll on Win9x platforms or start distributing two executable
> versions. One way or another the current situation, in which we limit
> ourselves to ANSI capabilites for the sake of win9x users cannot
> continue; bug 1314 should be fixed no later than the 2.4 release.

The last time that we built Abiword with unicows.dll I was getting random
hangs on Win98. The problem was never fixed and we finally come back to the
Ansi approach.

> There are advantages and disadvantages to both options. Unicows allows
> us to behave as a Unicode application all the time, but I recall that
> enabling unicows with AW was not that straight forward; it was Daniel
> who put lot of work into it, but there were problems with it, so that it
> is currently disabled. It has been a while back, and I am not sure what
> it would take to get it back on line.

All the strings that are passed into the Win32 API have to be Unicode. We have
isolated the places were we convert from UTF8 to Ansi locales, but keep in
mind that every user interface element will have to be reviewed.

> Having two executables, on the other hand, complicates the build process
> and bug fixing, but it also means uniform code internally (no runtime
> tests for what platform are we on and having different excution paths
> for different versions of the OS). At the same time, we will have to
> decide to discontinue support for the win9x at some point, and the work
> needed to get unicows working might be better utilised for other things.
> I am leaning slightly in the direction of two builds, but I would like
> to hear in particular from those who package AW what they think of it.

My suggestion is let's try to go for a single code base using unicows.dll. If
we have problems, like random hangs, we can consider having two builds.

I stronly believe that we should support Windows 98 or Windows ME for a few
years. Abiword performs well on old computers and we can not leave these users
behind.

Best Regards,

Note: Microsoft Office 2003 only support Windows 2000 or better.

-- 
Jordi Mas i Hernàndez
Homepage and LiveJournal at http://www.softcatala.org/~jmas