Re[2]: Thoughts and questions about input

[hashao <hashao china com>]

Hello Pablo,

Monday, March 13, 2000, 11:57:31 AM, you wrote:

PS> Kaixo!

PS> On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 01:19:54AM -0500, Shahbaz A Chaudhary wrote:

>> Now switching between multilingual typing modes is different from
>> switching between overall gui translation.  By that I mean an Urdu user
>> may be using english version of X-windows, but just need the ability to
>> type a few lines in Urdu--which is when we need quick and simple mode
>> switching.

PS> The correct way of doing that in the current X11 framework is to set
PS> the locale to Urdu, then force menus to English; eg:

PS> LC_ALL=ur
PS> LANGUAGE=en

PS> As the LC_ALL (LC_CTYPE in fact) will determine the usable fontsets,
PS> but also will determine wether a given eyboard layout will be fully usable
PS> or not.

This is not sufficient in some situation. As in Chinese, there are
both GB and Big5 encoding scheme. If a user want to switch from the
GB to Big5, he has to restart the application with a new locale
setting. There should be some mechanism to swith locale on the fly and
reload all the fontsets used to fit the new locale setting. Since to
X, Chinese GB and Chinese Big5 are basically different language, the
concept also apply to switching amongt different languages without restart a
running application. Maybe some hotkey or key+mouse combination can
be used to trigger the action in an gtk+ application.

-- 
Best regards,
 hashao                            mailto:hashao@china.com