> Here's how I'm planning on doing the encoding selection,
> so someone tell me if this either isn't going to work or
> if there's a better way to do it. I'm planning on
> simply pulling out the encoding field from the XLFDs
> in the fonts.dir (that's what the field is for, anyway).
> I guess I'll then just make user-friendly names for common
> sets ("Latin 1", "Latin 2", "Cyrillic", "Greek", etc.). My
> uncertainty is about mapping those user-friendly names
> to actual encodings. Will there always be a 1:1 mapping
> of, say, "Latin 1" to "iso-8859-1"? Will "Greek" always
> fall into, say "iso-8859-5", or will there be different
> flavors of local languages spread across different
> ISO encodings?
Maybe not, but "Latin 1 (iso-8859-1)" will always be iso-8859-1, and a latin
character set. Although, that would be a serious loss to screen real-estate,
unless you have a dialog box like this (excuse the ascii art):
-----------
| Latin 1 |
|---------|-------------
| Latin 1 (iso-8859-1) |
| Latin 2 (iso-8859-2) |
|______________________|
You may also want a tool-tip which says "character set" or something.
If possible, try to obtain the correct character set from the OS. Most people
won't touch it if they don't know what they're doing, so a reasonable default
is strongly advised.
-- -- Michael Samuel <michael@surfnetcity.com.au>