Re: [paragui-users] Full UNICODE support

[Teunis Peters]

On 12 Feb 2003, Kamil Skalski wrote:

> Well, I didn't get answer about Unicode support in ParaGUI, so I took
> the effort to get through FreeType and ParaGUI code. And then I've
> managed that ParaGUI lacks it at all. I really need this feature, so I
> played a little bit with code.
> So far I've changed text display (FontEngine class) to support UTF8.

I for one am VERY interested.  I've been working on the OpenGL branch -
which uses an entirely different rendering approach.  (it actually isn't
opengl requiring - it's just setup to support different rendering engines
including an opengl one)

As I work (sometimes) in a mix of English, French, German, Japanese and
the occasional throw-in Chinese (trad, I'm not up on modern at all),
Unicode support was one of those things I was still looking into.

Issues I've noticed:
        Do strings stay in UTF8 format?  (useful but not the only way)
        Layout rules
        - eg. left-to-right/right-to-left/top-to-bottom,compressed
        (Korean can be 'compressed' where multiple sounds make up
        a character)
        - Input methods (most Unix ones are X-specific, more the pity)
        - font caching (any ideas here?) for LARGE fonts

and related:
        - font caching - for quick display rather than rendering every
          character individually as the current system (opengl branch
          anyways) does.

What do you mean by Unicode support btw?  UCS-4, UCS-2, UTF-16, UTF-8
encodings?  Wide character support?

As far as I know, outside of tricky layouts and rendering, UTF8 should be
the easiest format to leave strings in though.  And it's compatible with
most existing C (and especially C++) libraries.  Also the added silly that
linux filenames can be encoded in UTF8....

I was approaching a 'pango' driver for handling text layout - but pango
only seems to operate with X - and breaks in FBcon badly.

Does that cover things clearly enough?  (these are just my thoughts and
goals on this topic :)

G'day, eh? :)
        - Teunis Peters