> - Xft/Xft2-based softwares cannot display Japanese and Korean at the > same time while Xft and Xft2 are UTF-8-based, because there are no > fonts which contain both of Japanese and Korean.
Xft is a very simple layer, so you cannot use it directly. Even in unicode with pango, you cannot distinguish between Chinese and Japanese text, so then you need application level support to switch between fonts using such mechanism's as HTML's "lang" attribute. Also, with opentype fonts that support different language-styles, this could become less of an issue at least on the font side, but you will always need a pango-like layer for layout. (Youll still have to tell pango which language-context you want a string to be in, I imagine. Also, from xft's point of view these are separate fonts inasmuch as if you'd asked for a rotation or scaling...) > - There are many window managers which support "themes". Even if the > window manager itself is already i18n-ed, some themes cannot > display non-Latin-1 languages. This occurs in two cases: (1) when > the theme specifies a font name (it is very likely) or (2) when the > theme supplies an origial font. If the theme engine uses pango for layout, and a desired language context is understood, I think this would work fine. Pango can always substitute fonts for missing glyphs... > - Tcl/Tk's XIM support is unstable even now. (Every time I try to > input Japanese, it sticks). When I read Tcl/Tk's roadmap in > version 8.0 age, I was really surprised that XIM support (essential > for CJK, as you know) is very low priority. eh, XIM needs to be dropped imo. From personal observation, building tools such as XIM and IIIMF which are integrated into the X server is the wrong way to go, and GTK+ input methods seem to work much better. > - Text editors which run on terminal rarely supports i18n. Emacs and > Vim are precious exceptions. Vim, my favorite editor, still does not support UTF8_STRING for clipboard operations :( > - Text line wrapping. Chinese and Japanese (not Korean) don't use > whitespace between "words". Ooh, that makes me curious: is there a good discussion of how to line-break Japanese text? I wonder how browsers are doing it... -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
