On Thu, 15 May 2008 20:58:48 +0300 Shachar Shemesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> babbled:
> Michael Shiloh wrote: > > Have we made the decision then to officially move away from GTK? This > > was asked on the community list awhile ago, and IIRC there has been no > > "official" answer. > > > > Michael > Sorry for coming in the middle of the thread like that. Just wanted to > point something out. > > Moving from GTK to QT is well enough (though I do most of my GUI > programming using wxWidgets, and it has no native QT port). HOWEVER, if > we are considering moving away from the mainline toolkits altogether, > the question of "non-standard" languages must be addressed. By > "non-standard", I mean the BiDi languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi) and > the CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). I can tell you that > getting a new toolkit to support those at the same level as GTK and QT > does is a non-trivial task. I know that because all of the Wine BiDi > support was written by me, and I have very good knowledge of how little > is in there, and how much work it took. > > Just something to keep in mind. The whole world does NOT use languages > that are written one letter at a time, left to right, one keypress at a > time. indeed. but most of the world does use languages that for display purposes are 1 glyph per letter and happily drawn left to right. for typing of course we have a new world of hurt. all of east-asia is happy left-to-right. western europe, north and south america, northern asia, eastern europe, and a large chunk of africa. in india roman text is pretty popular as is english (remember these are generalisations you can find exceptions). i am making broad generalisations - but as such, they are fairly true. :) as such EFL has no right-to-left support - why? no one has yet to step up and help. why? there is so little demand for it :( even the guys i know who do EFL dev that speak/read arabic prefer using english (they are from lebanon). i know it sounds harsh - i don't mean to be, but minority languages tend to get the worse end of the stick support-wise :( i know how painful it can be supporting them - i looked into doing right-to-left and gave up when i saw the world of hurt that was doing mixes right-to-left and left-to-right formatting... (english quoted inside arabic text, or vice-versa). one day i should make use of pango for some of this - but at the time i wrote my font engine pango was new and fairly sluggish. one day there will be enough impetus for someone to do something about it, but until now - that hasn't existed. :( -- Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community