guran wrote:
> Moshe Vainer wrote:
>
> In an ideal world (I have to admit that Win2000 multilingual edition comes very
>close to
>
> > it) one would
> > expect that everything would be Unicode, all fonts will be Unicode or
>automatically
> > substituted
> > based on Unicode section of current letter, and keyboard bindings would be easily
> > switchable among all
> > languages.
> >
> > B. Rgrds,
> > Moshe Vainer
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> I can't estemate the workload needed to switch to Unicode, but the other day I
>downloaded the
> specification for the Word97 scheme. It was 95 K.
>
Well, i don't know what word97 scheme has to do with it..
The switch to Unicode is not necessarily needed, but it seems that most applications
in Linux
including most of Gnome/KDE applications, choose fonts with priority slanted towards
font face name, and not it's locale. IMHO, locale is your first cut through the list
of available fonts, not the other way around.
In multilingual environment i would do something like this to type in any amount of
languages:
Set font to whatever (let's say helvetica)
1) switch keyboard to language #1
2) type something in that language
3) switch keyboard to language #2
3.1) the system notices that there is no helvetica font in the locale of language #2,
so
current font becomes (first available font in that locale/ predefined font that
matches
helevtica/ some other way to choose fonts)
4.) type something in that language
and so on and so on.
I dislike windows in many respects, but it works just like that in that respect.
And this has nothing to do with what language your menu is displayed with, that should
be a
separate setting
if at all. That's basically the difference between Localization and Internalization
(l10n /
i18n).
As regarding Unicode, it is simply a more complete and easy system for developers more
so than
for users.
It is much easier to assume that you can determine what language the char is uniquely
from
the char itself rather than playing with locale settings for pieces of text.
If you are not using unicode, than more likely than not, that Russian and Hebrew will
produce
same character values (127-255). in that case you have to mark your text as either.
In Unicode, uniqueness is guaranteed (as well as many other things unicode does).
>
> But I wish I could switch nicely among the fonts used in Europe. On the ATARI 1040ST
>of the
> mid eighties, you could click for a screen with additional fonts, that was to be
>added to a
> letter.
>
> regards
> guran
