Re: [sword-devel] Chinese "words"

Mon, 30 Jun 2003 09:34:25 -0700

In a message dated 6/27/2003 5:23:34 PM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>I think the right thing to do is to change your layout engine to support
>correct Chinese line wrapping, instead of adding space (which should not be
>there) to work around the limitation in the layout engine.

I second that.

>Neither have space after puncation. No space, period.

Whoops... you're right. Thanks for the correction. I noticed people
don't seem to do it the "correct" way always, though, but I guess it
also depends on the font being used (ie. the glyphs being the correct
width for punctuation marks).

>Second, there are no easy way to parse a word.

That's why I think it would be too complicated to built Chinese word
splitting into Sword, unless e.g. ICU starts to come with a nice
built-in option we can just use. It's just not worth the effort. It's
easier to just let the user make the guess himself.
Mozilla have an Unicde base line breaker which can be easily port to other enivronment. ICU also have a line breaker which is very close to the line breaker interface in Java.
Those line breaker tell the app where (in the of character buffer offset) is the line break opportunity, the app then call the os to find out the length of the window and the length of the text and see it want to break in there or break in the next opportunity. It basically replace the operation of "find me the next space character " in the westen only based layout.
 
The gecko based line breaker interface is on
The implementation is on
(based on Japanese layout standard)

>google implement very good Chinese search. Maybe you should look at how they do
>the search job.

Again, I think it's overkill for Sword.

Greetings,
   Christian

Reply via email to