Re: Pango Status Report, 4 Apr 2000

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Wed, Apr 05, 2000 at 12:40:42AM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
 
>  My project of switching GTK+ over to use Pango is finally
>  beginning to show some results. Some first screenshots are
>  at:
> 
>   http://www.pango.org/gallery.shtml

Really awesome; and in particular the fact that widgets are mirrorable
is a very nice thing; I wasn't aware that it had been thought when
building gtk+, big kudos for it ! (very few is missign to have perfect
behaviour, I spotted the dropdown lists, where the 'handle' is not mirrored;
the tabs, where the tab should be put at the right of each sheet;
and I wonder if Window Managers can be made aware of that (maybe a new
WM hint would be needed to tell that a window is in RTL mode (buttons
are mirroredand the title right justified); in other words what is still
missing are widgets that need to be redrawn differently and not only put
at another palce, when changed to RTL mode)

>  Karl Koehler made a large number of improvements to his Arabic
>  shaper, including expanding the available ligatures, supporting more
>  font encodings, and adding Farsi support. (Which apparently
>  needs testing.)

I would like to help with font support. Is there some small tutorial
available ? Otherwise, should I start looking at pango code or libunicode
code ?

>    - Come up with a XKB-based keyboard map for Arabic, so people

Is XKB mandatory ? I run Xserver with XKB support disabled and I load
an xmodmap file, but when I tryed typing (the edit widget of the tests
of gtk+ 1.3) it outputs errors of "illegal utf8 string" (or something like
that, I don't remember exactly); I use keysysms in my xmodmap file
(eg: agrave, ccdeilla,...) and I'm with LC_ALL set to a latin1 locale.
Or is it that those keysysms have yet to be defined ? (where?)


On another side, I know several people that are willing to do translations
to Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi, but that untill now I told them it wasn't possible
due to lack of support. Do you think it would be a good idea to create
some complied versions of gtk+-with-pango (of course with BIG LETTERS warnings
telling that gtk+ 1.3 is development only etc); then they can start doing
translations; that will have several benefits: when gtk+ 1.4 will be out
it will already have translations for those languages from first day;
pango/gtk+ developpers will have real texts to test with; and also a real
world testbed with feedback from native people that can tell interesting
things about some details that non native people can maybe overseen.   

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.ping.be/~pin19314/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975