Hi,
> are you trying to say that before we are to start "hindizing" the
> applications, the whole Xwindows servers have to be re-written to be able to
> support unicode ?
> and , since I don't profess to know everything, what is unicode ?
Unicode is the international standard for representing
multilingual text. It defines several formats (the most commonly used one
is 2 byte encoding, as in M$ and java, but they also talk about a 4 byte
encoding, AFAIK nothing is defined in the 4 byte thing as of now).
Unicode is a "industry consortium" standard, M$ being one partner.
The ISO mostly adopted the same standard and called it ISO-10646. I may be
wrong here, and it may be unicode which tookup iso-10646 and named it
unicode.
One major strength of M$ is that they support unicode fully, and
the API reflects it. For every normal library function, they also have a
"w" version (printf, wprintf) that accepts the arguments in unicode 2 byte
encoding.
AFAIK xlib, which is used by all X apps including
gnome/kde/whatever, doesn't yet support unicode.
What gnome does is they support a kind of encoding called
"UTF-8", which is sufficient for most european languages based on roman
script, and chinese and far eastern languages.
Indian and arabian languages are a royal pain to support because
of the complex ways in which our text is written (compared to roman, and
even chinese/japnese).
If you want more info about this, visit www.pango.org. It seems
they have support for tamil. I am going through their design and other
docs to figure out how to support devanagari
(marathi/hindi/bengali/gujarati).
Regards,
Kedar.
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