On Jul 18, 2011, at 10:55 AM, MacArthur, Ian (SELEX GALILEO, UK) wrote:
> ...
> This is true, of course, but could be a fair bit of work for us to make
> it fly - we would certainly be into the 1.4/3.x range for this!

We could certainly introduce Pango or ICU support as an experimental addition 
in 1.3 and default in 3.0 for X11. The current situation definitely limits how 
much Unicode can be supported without platform-specific code.

> ...
> - switch to rendering (at least) word-by-word rather than
> glyph-by-glyph, as this makes it easier to interpret the context of each
> glyph in the word and composite it correctly.

You want line (or phrase) rendering; word rendering loses bi-dir text handling.

Basically, fl_draw would need to be modified slightly to pass each line it 
formats through Pango (or ICU) to generate the final display sequences.

>> ...
>> There are some other helpful things that FLTK could provide without a
>> lot of overhead/bloat:
> 
> Though maybe with some extra dependencies...

True, but the point would be to use "native" libraries whenever possible.

>> 1. A number formatter and scanner that uses the current locale -
>> particularly for Arabic, but also to handle decimal and thousands
>> separators.
> 
> I'd guess that ICU / PanGo / iconv must know this stuff anyway?

I don't think iconv supports this; ICU and Pango do though...

> ...
> Is there something specific about number handling for Arabic texts? I
> don't know but I always assumed, since the number system in Arabic texts
> is derived from broadly the same Indic sources as the numbers used in
> modern LGC scripts, that they would be more or less the same - is that
> not the case?

It is, unfortunately, not the case...

>> ...
>> This could be used to reposition
> 
> Something got clipped here?
> I guess "reposition the text on the line" or something?

Ooops, must have deleted the rest by accident - "This could be used to 
reposition widgets and change the appearance of widgets."

>> 3. Methods to implement localization of strings (perhaps layered
>> on top of the corresponding OS API, or using FLTK-specific code - I
>> can contribute a .po/.strings file loader)
> 
> Yup - gettext / catgets / whatever OSX and WINXX do... I have no real
> idea about this...


I've done enough wrappers - not a big deal to implement efficiently.

________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products

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