Re: win32 Unicode support

On 18 Jan 2005, at 08:48, Tomas Frydrych wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.

Hi Tomas,
 From what I remember the difficulties, or at least the work, came in
the places where AbiWord expects UTF8 or codepage text and having to
convert it to UTF16 for Unicode Windows. This was virtually all
localisation bits. Also there are listboxes and other parts of dialogs.
I suspect it will be very little extra work to get it working with
unicows as to getting unicode working in the first place. The extra
work would be mostly in the build system.

The stuff I had done is in the w32unicode branch though it is well out
of sync with HEAD by now.

If we want to make this a priority for 2.4 then I think we should go
ahead and do this in HEAD. For the moment we can use ifdefs and keep
the 9x and unicode builds separate because this will break the build
until it is all fixed. We can decide later whether to release 1 build
or 2.

Regards,
Daniel
Received on Tue Jan 18 23:56:34 2005