On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, Jan Willem Stumpel wrote: > It would be nice if solutions to common problems (in this case > 'how to put an UTF-8 string on to the screen', solved, e.g., by > Openoffice) were shared between different open-source projects.
OpenOffice uses ICU's layout engine that supports some complex scripts but not all complex scripts. In case of AbiWord, I don't know anything about its internals, but ICU and Pango (http://www.pango.org) are two obvious choices (both are open-sourced) if its developers want to support complex scripts (Brahmi-derived scripts - Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Tibet, etc-, Korean Hangul, Mongolian). Does it support scripts that require BIDI/RTL (Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic among others)? Also, note that even Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets are complex once you go beyond basic stuffs because some languages need base letter + combining diacritic marks for which there's no precomposed form in Unicode. Jungshik -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
