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To: The Ant Community <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Paul Rohr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Mike Nordell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: keyboard input of arbitrary characters
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 27 Apr 2001 02:30:04 +0200."
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Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 09:00:12 +0100
From: Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Paul Rohr wrote:
> I really like the idea of having a keyboard-driven ALT+ mechanism to input
> arbitrary characters, but rather than stick to Windows-specific codepage
> conventions, wouldn't we want to somehow specify *Unicode* characters as
> the alternative to ANSI?
Are you aware that there exists an ISO standard for hexadecimal input
of UCS characters?
Please have a look at:
ISO/IEC 14755:1997, Information Technology -- Input methods to enter
characters from the repertoire of ISO/IEC 10646 with a keyboard or
other input devices
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/ISO-14755.pdf
The basic input method it defines is to hold Shift+Control while
entering a hexadecimal number, in order to enter an arbitrary UCS code.
You could implement this in Abiword, but I'd rather like to see this
instead (or in addition) implemented in the X11 Xlib input method
mechanics. Stuff like the entry of UCS characters should be provided by
the OS or GUI in a standard way for all applications. It is not
something that every application should have to reinvent independently.
We are getting there, but only slowly.
In XFree86, we have also established the convention that UCS character
U-xxxxxx corresponds to X11 keysym 0x01xxxxxx. If you process keysyms
directly, you should support this convention. Alternatively, switch into
a UTF-8 locale and XmbLookupString will provide you with the same
functionality (in XFree86 so far only, but hopefully X.Org will pick this
up in R6.6.1 as well).
For more information:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#x11
Have you seen that all the X11 standard fonts are now available in
ISO10646-1?
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html
All these will also ship with XFree86 4.1 soon.
I haven't looked at Abiword yet, but I keep a list of Unicode-aware
Linux applications in my Unicode on Linux FAQ on
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
and it would be nice if someone knowledgeable could contribute a brief
statement about the current state of UCS support in Abiword.
If you are interested in Unicode under Unix/Linux, I'd highly recommend
that you join the linux-utf8 and [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing lists:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#lists
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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