> We would like to include Bengali script (Indic script) in > FLTK. We would also like to control the keyboard entry to > make the entry phonetic. Can anyone suggest how to start ?
Well, first off you need a version of fltk that can display the character glyphs for you (the base fltk-1.x really only handles ASCII strings and localised variants of that.) So you either need to look at fltk-2 (which includes some utf8 support) or one of the utf8 patches fltk-1.1 variants (there are several of these kicking about, mine is here: http://www.imm.uklinux.net/fltk/fltk118-utf8-2007-07-14.tar.bz2 ) However, all that really gives you is the ability to display glyphs from a suitable Unicode font. Thereafter there are a number of further problems that need to be addressed, that are not covered by the fltk library at all. 1. Text direction: If you need to be able to handle left-to-right and right-to-left text ordering (I don't think you do for Bengali?) then you might need to use libfribidi or similar to handle detection, manipulation and etc. of text order. (Actually displaying l-r or r-l text fltk can do, or at least my fltk-1.1.x-patch does, I think fltk2 does also.) 2. Composite characters: This isn't all that common among latin languages for example, but many languages (and Bengali might be amongst them?) use variant representations for character glyphs depending on which characters precede or follow them, or where they appear in the word... This can be a Hard Problem to handle and fltk provides no support for it. There are a number of libraries that help with this problem, the most obvious one being Pango - which was originally created to solve this problem for the gtk folk. I have never tried integrating Pango with fltk. It might work. Or you might be able to handle this problem directly yourselves, if you only have the one language to cope with... (and if it is actually a problem that your language has...) 3. Input Methods: All the common platforms (*nix, OSX, win32) provide some sort of input method support for inputting of "non-latin" languages from a "latin-style" keyboard. These can be integrated with fltk to provide keyboard input for your app. For example on linux this would be done using XIM (or increasingly these days by SCIM, which is a sort of enhanced XIM). This generally appears to the user as a separate (usually floating) edit widget into which you can type phonetic representations or etc., and the "proper" representation appears in the underlying application window. Most IM systems support multiple languages - SCIM for example has a plug-in architecture that allows you to install plugins for various languages as required, each plug-in "knows" the mapping from "latin" keys to target language representation. All the IM versions on the various platforms have well defined and documented API's. That doesn't mean they are easy to use, unfortunatley, and if (for example) your code has to work on libnux, OSX and win32 systems it can all get a little messy as the API's aren't really similar enough...! So, in summary, it can be done, but it is not easy. Googling for XIM and SCIM might give you some leads, but there is still a lot of work to do on *all* computing platforms (not just fltk) to make this work as well as it should! SELEX Sensors and Airborne Systems Limited 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 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.easysw.com/mailman/listinfo/fltk
