Re: [paragui-users] Full UNICODE support

[Kamil Skalski]

> 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

BTW I was wondering if ParaGUI could be entirely rendered by OpenGL.
OpenGl supports loading textures into it's memory and hardware blitting
them into view...

>       Do strings stay in UTF8 format?  (useful but not the only way)

I don't get what you mean... UTF8 are strings in C meaning. And as far
as I can see, Para don't assume how they look like, except for LineEdit
code. There is still standard rule, that string is ended with '\0' and
in UTF8 it holds.

>       Layout rules
>       - eg. left-to-right/right-to-left/top-to-bottom,compressed
>       (Korean can be 'compressed' where multiple sounds make up
>       a character)

Wow. It is an issue which I didn't even think about. But anyway it seems
to be only problem of positioning text in widgets and rendering in some
other directions than it's done now, so it should be easy to modify and
generalize current code to support such things.

>       - Input methods (most Unix ones are X-specific, more the pity)

First I thought that SDL provides unicodes for any input characters, but
now I'm really disappointed. I searched web for a while and there seems
to be no general method to interpret input as unicode codes.

>       - font caching - for quick display rather than rendering every
>         character individually as the current system (opengl branch

I don't know the internal architecture of ParaGUI, so I've no idea.
What's wrong about just cache once used character glyph?

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

As I understand unicode, there are only ONE unicode codes and UTF-16,
UTF-8... are just endoding of these codes, way to write 32-bit integers
into text files. So what I mean by unicode support is just set of
methods do support text written in unicode (precisely in some encoding,
like UTF8 - simpliest), display it in ParaGUI labels and make possible
to type them form keyboard (could be not so easy as I thought)

> 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 agree... it seems that I didn't tell anything new... but as for now I
can display strings in UTF8 just like they should look like. And maybe
it would be possible to type in special characters even if it requires
platform specific chartables.