Re: GTK internationalization, right-to-left languages

[Nimrod Zimerman <zimerman earthling net>]

On Mon, May 11, 1998 at 07:06:04PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:

> If you are really interested in creating your own font from scratch...
> I think there is probably is an editor for bitmap X fonts around.
> Though I don't have a reference.

Once upon a time I looked for such utilities, but came up empty handed. If I
try to design a font myself, it would be a great failure - but I did believe
I could find better looking fonts and somehow incorporate them into X.
The current Hebrew fonts used in X (primarily in Netscape, I would guess)
are of a very low quality. They are pretty ugly, even. I hope gtk could do
better.

> > Text widgets should, in general, support *several* fonts, one for each
> > language. I'm not certain how this can be implemented without requiring
> > huge storage if many languages are added to gtk, however.
> 
> Font and language are different things. In theory, using Unicode
> you could have a single font for all languages. On the other
> hand, a language like Arabic may be displayed using several
> 8-bit fonts. 

What happens to the current font families? A modest Windows machine probably
has about 30 font families, not including localized fonts.
I assume this won't change in the future. In theory, a font can contain
Unicode as a whole, but in practice, how many fonts like that would we have?
Probably just a few (because there is no real use for this kind of thing).

Regarding Arabic - isn't it enough to assume one Unicode font could cover
all required chracters? As you probably know, exceptions are the one thing a
programmer hates more than a memory corruption bug... (but, handled
correctly, this probably shouldn't be treated as an exception at all. Huge
tables covering the whole character are probably common enough).

> To the Japanese eye, one of these character written in the Chinese
> fashion, even though understandable, is incorrect. So
> to correctly display a Unicode 6f22, it is not sufficient to
> just know if it is Unicode 6f22, you also have to know whether
> it is the Japanese 6f22 or the Chinese 6f22.

Doesn't that somewhat defeat the point of Unicode? Oh, well.

Does it really matter, or can it be ignored? (Differently put - what's the
chance an angry Japanese would decide to bomb gtk's headquarters after using
a utility that uses the Chinese version of the letter?).

                                                   Nimrod