Hello, [my name is oliver, call me oldo, i am a linguist, teacher and software developer and Debian/GNU/GPL enthusiast.] there was an external Non-member submission from Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> concerning unicode (utf-8) support in Abiword. I think the topic is really important to make Abiwords international and long-term success even bigger. Markus is the maintainer of the Unicode-UTF8-FAQ for GNU/Linux platforms. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html I don't want to speak for him here, but I like the way he advocates for standard compliance (backed on his insigth knowledge in many relevant areas). A qoute from his E-Mail follows: -- Markus Kuhn wrote to AbiWord Dev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with respect to input methods: [..] 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 -- # end of qoute thanks! oldo
