Havoc Pennington Wrote: --------------------------------------------------------------------- One concern I have about AbiWord is duplication of effort below the GTK layer. For example I'm busy implementing line/word/sentence/grapheme breaking in Pango now. Reimplementing all the Pango stuff is going to be really unfortunate - I think it would be a lot better if you guys could share i18n, Unicode, and font infrastructure with all the other apps. Especially because for people using the more unusual languages, I would expect Pango and some other implementation of the same things to behave fairly differently, which will create problems. Windows 2000 has Uniscribe which is sort of equivalent to Pango, but unlike Pango you can't use that API on all platforms. Pango is definitely being kept working on Windows and is designed to be portable. If you try to use native libs - selecting Uniscribe, Pango, etc. by platform - it's going to result in platform-specific code deep in the guts of Abi's text layout functionality, which is not going to be pleasant. Building an abstraction layer on top of Pango/Uniscribe seems pointless, because Pango is already an abstraction layer for this, and already will use Windows stuff on Windows. Of course OpenOffice is not better in this respect, so this comment applies equally to them. --------------------------------------------------------------- I cross posted this to Abiword so the real experts can answer. Just a quick response though. There is no reason we can't use our current system for raw GTK and Pango/libunicode etc for gnome. I haven't been involved in this. Do you use iconv to convert between different X font maps? Or does GTK 2.0 solve all that for us automatically? We've been plauged with compatibility problems between different versions of iconv. The latest glibc returns 16 bit wide chars byte swapped compared to earlier versions. Even earlier version segfault on valid input. When GTK 2.0 is pronounced "Stable" we will certainly look at what is implemented for internationalization. Only the GTK version of Abi has CJK support right now. Cheers Martin
