> What level of character support do you require from FLTK in > the future? > 1. plain ASCII only, so UTF-8 support needed
Works now. > 2. ASCII plus Western accented characters Works now. > 3. simple left-to-right character sets (Greek, Cyrillic...) Works now. > 4. simple right-to-left character sets (Arabic, Hebrew...) Hard Problem. > 5. complex character sets (Chinese, Japanese, Korean...) Pretty much works now, for LtoR rendering - note that CJK in the LtoR rendering case is not that different from rendering a Western script - it has more characters, but that's not really an issue, as there *tends* to be a simple mapping between glyphs on the display and character codes stored in memory, and there is nothing too fancy required to render them. CJK in other orientations is trickier (i.e. top to bottom) but can probably be done with what we have in place. I'd say that (4) on this list is a harder problem than (5) generally, as the Semitic scripts in general require you to solve both the RtoL rendering problem, and the fact that the scripts tend to have characters elided together and so forth, so what is rendered on-screen need not have a one-one mapping to the sequence of glyphs stored in the canonical representation of the string in memory... Also: What's missing from this list is: 6. rendering of Indic scripts and other scripts that are rendered differently depending on the position and nature of adjacent characters, and so on - again you have the problem that what is rendered need not have a one-one mapping to the sequence of glyphs stored in the canonical representation of the string in memory. To properly solve (4) and (6) we'd need some sort of text compositing engine - PanGo and ICU might help, but I suspect that this is beyond what we should incorporate into FLTK. It would help a lot if we could find some volunteers for whom the Indic scripts are the native language, as they might be better placed than anyone to figure out all the wrinkles with this... I'd hazard that if they/we could figure out the Indic scripts then fixing the Semitic scripts would be a gentle breeze in comparison! SELEX Galileo Ltd Registered Office: Sigma House, Christopher Martin Road, Basildon, Essex SS14 3EL A company registered in England & Wales. Company no. 02426132 ******************************************************************** This email and any attachments are confidential to the intended recipient and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient please delete it from your system and notify the sender. You should not copy it or use it for any purpose nor disclose or distribute its contents to any other person. ******************************************************************** _______________________________________________ fltk-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.easysw.com/mailman/listinfo/fltk-dev
