Re: internationalization

[andreww@cse.unsw.edu.au (Andrew White)]

Massimo Campostrini writes:

> I am not sure which information is needed to choose the right glyphs;
> isn't character sequence + language enough?
> 
> I didn't think about input.  At least, users should be able to name
> units in their favorite language.  For Italian (and other languages
> just needing diacritics) with an US keyboard under X, sequences like
> "Multi_key ` a" for a_grave are adequate.  Maybe look at the way
> emacs/mule handles input?  I have no clue about Mac either.

Mac has had these sort of facilities for a long time (I'm not sure whether
they were part of the original, but it's close).  Their text formatting
libraries now also support unicode as well as custom diacritics.  It also
has support for several glyph based languages, but I don't know how easy it
would be to exploit that in xconq.

> > If xconq is using gtk, it gets all the support from the developement of
> > the widget set. But the Mac port remains a problem. Have you considered
> > porting gtk+ to mac :) ?

The "Mac" way of doing full translation (vs "foreign" character entry)
would be to store your language dependent code in STR# resources and
similar, and then replace these resources with new ones when you changed
languages.  However, this may not be a particularly good cross-platform
solution.

-- 
Andrew White
andreww@cse.unsw.edu.au
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~andreww/
"A complex problem is merely a simple hierarchy of simple problems"