On Tuesday 14 January 2003 12:46 pm, Bruno Haible wrote: > Manel de la Rosa writes: > > I don't need a complex rendering system or anything killer. Simply > > display a label with a UTF-8 encoded string. > > This is a contradiction in itself.
Hear, hear. > The purpose of UTF-8 is that it can be used for languages from Russian > over Vietnamese to Indic. This needs a complex rendering engine: for > Russian you already need fonts in non-ISO-8859-1 encoding; for > Vietnamese you need to attach multiple accents to a single letter, and > for Indic (Devanagari etc.) you need vowel reordering. Not to mention > right-to-left reordering (Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi), the problem of > choosing the right fonts, and dealing with the subtleties of these > fonts. The remaining problems in current software are Indic and other south Asian writing systems plus Tibetan and Mongolian. They all have difficult features, and most require reordering, stacking, and complex ligatures. > Only two free GUI toolkits have the rendering engines today: Qt/KDE > and GNOME. Also Mozilla and (to a more limited extent) GNU Emacs have > some rendering engines, but not embedded in a GUI toolkit. > > With Motif/Lesstif you cannot go further than displaying Russian. > There are no internationalization efforts underway there. (Except > there is a complex rendering underway at the low X11 level, by Sun, > http://stsf.sourceforge.net/, but I have no idea how easy it will be > to use it when it will be finished, and whether the Motif adaptation > will be freely distributable.) > > So my recommendation is: Drop Motif, and use KDE/Qt (if the GPL is > acceptable for your program) or GNOME. Qt has a module that helps in > migrating from Motif to Qt. > > > with a short X11/UTF-8 "Hello World" example, for instance > > Can't be done. A *short* demo may be impossible, but we're close to something usable. A multilingual SIL Graphite "Hello World" is in development. It is still fighting font bugs and other obstacles. Screenshots of the related Graphite Worldpad demo can be found at http://sila.mozdev.org/screenshots.html The demo uses Graphite to render English as Pig Latin (reordering); Latin letters with multiple diacritics in a language of Burkina Faso and in arbitrary combinations (stacking); Burmese and IPA (complex scripts). The SILA project aims at integrating SIL's Graphite software with MozilLA. It is in an Alpha state, so you can download it and try it. > Bruno -- Edward Cherlin Generalist "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
