Re: [MiNT] UTF-8 support

["Guido Flohr" <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2000 at 09:11:27AM +0200, Jo Even Skarstein wrote:
> > arrows).  I think that future AES versions should
> > overcome this nuisance
> > and automagically translate control characters < ASCII
>
> You don't have to wait, if you use N.AES you can use a font with the old Atar$ 
But what do I do if I want to or have to use another font for text labels
in GUI elements? For example I want to display a dialog box with Japanese
text labels but this dialog box has a slider conventionally equipped with
two box chars showing an up and a down arrow.  It would be easiest if the
AES simply replaced all occurrencies of characters <SPACE by their
graphical representation in the Atari codeset.  That would also ensure a
consistent look and feel, because the hand-tailored sliders would have the
same appearance as the window sliders.
 
Another drawback of the AES is that the graphics are not separated by the
text, they both come from the binary resource file.  A couple of years ago
I have written a package called xgemtext which was an approach to solve
the problem.  A program allowed to extract all strings from the resource
file and put them in a pseudo C file where the strings were properly
marked for further processing by GNU gettext.  At run-time you could use a
library that comes along with gemtext to "translate" your GUI on the
fly: You could pass arbitrary AES objects to the library and it replaced
all strings with their translation.  The library also had a crude layout
manager that automatically resized all objects in your tree according to
the new text lengths.  The results were ok if you followed some design
guidelines.
 
I received a lot of feedback for xgemtext.  Mostly from X programmers, a
little from Windows programmers, zero from GEM programmers.  However, if
you are interested, GNU gettext still contains a README about
xgemtext.  As far as I remember it also points to a server from where you
can download xgemtext.
 
> > wide character strings are UTF-8).  A while ago I have
> > experimented a
> > little with GDOS bitmap fonts that exceed the 256
> > -character-limit and it
> > mostly worked.  The font editors all had problems with
>
> A temporary workaround would be to let the VDI do conversions on the fly, e.g$

A conversion is not optimal because the Atari codeset and Latni 1 don't
have the same supply of characters.  Besides, that would make applications
lose that already do conversions.

There also must be found a solution for keyboard input.  It's not
sufficient to be able to display text in other codesets, you also need to
edit it.  IMHO the best solution for that could be done in the kernel,
some kind of Fcntl that allows you to remap the keyboard system-wide.

Finally we have the console font.  As far as I remember you can already
change the fonts for virtual consoles.  The same is needed for the system
console handled by the kernel.

Ciao

Guido
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