Call for I18N testers gnome-terminal/zvt + I18N patches

[HideToshi Tajima <hidetoshi tajima sun com>]

Title:

Hi, I18N-ers,

I'd like to call for volunteers to test I18N patches of Zvt terminal widgets
for gnome-terminal, although
no real reward can be expected, but you can save the current sad situation
that there is no working
I18N terminal emulator in Gnome2(.0.x) desktop environment.

Objective of this is to get the patches merged into the stable branch for
2.0.2. Wide user testing
is hard requirement to make it happen, while there is only have 4-6 weeks
2.0.2 freeze.


About changes in the Zvt I18N Patches:

1. Zvt uses Gtk Input Methods API to do i18n text input. It does it in "over-the-spot" fashion in multi-byte locales.
2. It internally uses Unicode to handld line buffer, and converts it with locale string when the text is input from/output to the apps running on the terminal emulator, using glib's g_io_channel and g_convert.
3. It uses Pango to get font description - and then create XFontSet from it(see below).
   
4. It does not use PangoLayout for drawing text on terminal emulator window, but use Xlib functions XmbDrawString and XmbDrawImageString directly - and perhaps I would add #ifdef HAS_XFT stuffs for Xft,( and #ifdef ST/XST case sometime soon.)
5. It shows much better performance in the 'ls -R /' test case Micheal Meeks pointed out with VTE a few days ago.
6. It always draws characters in mono-spaced fashion - drawing one character at a time, "filling" space to the next character so that the width of each character looks always same in single-byte locales, and in multi-byte locales the width of single-byte character and that of multi-byte character is always 1:2.
7. It has been tested by G11N QA team in CJK locales in Solaris8, 9, 10, using locale profterm build on HEAD + plus a local patch to enable Pango Font instead of X fonts.

To obtain, build and run:

You can get I18N-ed libzvt from the libzvt-i18n branch, instead of the HEAD.
Then, build profterm on the
HEAD with a patch attached to this mail. This is to choose pango font names
in font selection preference,
instead of XLFD names currently used.
 
The patched gnome-terminal and Zvt has been tested on Solaris 8 and 9 in
many locales including Western
and Eastern Europe, CJK and Unicode, and has proved that it's working pretty
stable without any reported
crashes. But, honestly, it is not tested enough on Linux or any other Unix
systems, so testing on these
platforms are highly demanded and very welcome.

And not to mention, there are a few known issues:

1. bold fonts are not supported yet.
2. Code conversion errors between UTF-8 and locale multibyte string happens a bit often.
3. still slow :-/
   

Yep, there should be more room of performance improvement. Evaluation and
suggestion for this is extremely
welcome, too.

Finally again, if you are kind to be volunteers, I really really appreciate!!

Regards,
Toshi


? stamp-h1
? help/C/gnome-terminal-C.omf.out
Index: ChangeLog
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gnome/profterm/ChangeLog,v
retrieving revision 1.211.2.2
diff -u -r1.211.2.2 ChangeLog
--- ChangeLog	2002/07/14 20:58:01	1.211.2.2
+++ ChangeLog	2002/08/02 02:55:54
@@ -1,3 +1,9 @@
+Mon Jul 29 14:51:07 2002  HideToshi Tajima  <hidetoshi.tajima@sun.com>
+
+	* src/terminal-widget-zvt.c (terminal_widget_supports_pango_fonts,
+	terminal_widget_set_pango_font):
+	use pango fonts instead of x fonts
+
 2002-07-14  Jordi Mallach  <jordi@sindominio.net>
 
 	* configure.in (ALL_LINGUAS): add ca (Catalan).
Index: src/terminal-widget-zvt.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gnome/profterm/src/terminal-widget-zvt.c,v
retrieving revision 1.7
diff -u -r1.7 terminal-widget-zvt.c
--- src/terminal-widget-zvt.c	2002/06/02 14:44:21	1.7
+++ src/terminal-widget-zvt.c	2002/08/02 02:55:58
@@ -1097,11 +1097,12 @@
 terminal_widget_set_pango_font (GtkWidget                  *widget,
                                 const PangoFontDescription *font_desc)
 {
-  ; /* does nothing */
+  g_return_if_fail (font_desc != NULL);
+  zvt_term_set_pango_font (ZVT_TERM (widget), font_desc);
 }
 
 gboolean
 terminal_widget_supports_pango_fonts (void)
 {
-  return FALSE;
+  return TRUE;
 }