Re: internationalised terminal for gnome

[Suresh Chandrasekharan <suresh chandrasekharan eng sun com>]

Thanks for replying, Havoc.
Michael Zuchhi was kind enough to pass on the info. on the latest efforts on 
this and where we are now with regards to these efforts.
Including the salient points in his mail for the community.
zvt widget implements these i18n features currenntly.

 - cut and paste of simple strings via the UTF-8 atom to other UTF-8
capable applications, with a fallback to iso-latin-1 STRING atoms if
required.
 - internally uses UCS2 (i.e. 16 bit characters) for all character
storage
 - handles chracter set switching commands ESC%G to switch to UTF-8
mode, and whatever the reverse is.  Although it doesn't handle some of
the codes that lock it in. (i can never seem to find/understand the
documentation that describes all of these codes).
 - rejects invalid UTF-8 sequences (or most of them)
 - support of 16 bit iso-10646 encoded, *fixed width* fonts for the
display of the unicode data

What it doesn't do:
 - bi-width fonts for better CJK rendering.  This is probably not
particularly hard to add with a routine to determine which characters to
display 2x width.  (what i mean is using 2x width characters for asian
characters, and 1x for other characters).
 - proportional fonts at all, not very easy to add, at least given the
algorithm used to optimise updates and provide the silly graphics
background stuff at a reasonable speed.  A proportional mode could
probably be plugged in (but imho it never works right for a terminal
with a fixed width).
 - font matching/re-encoding, in Unicode mode it assumes the font is
unicode coded, or iso-latin-1, if it is an 8 bit font.
 - character composing, decomposition, or anything with the Unicode
characters it receives.


	I will work on filling up the missing elements and keep you all posted.
regards,
suresh


>Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2001 11:07:19 -0500
>From: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>
>Subject: Re: internationalised terminal for gnome
>To: Suresh Chandrasekharan <suresh chandrasekharan eng sun com>
>Cc: gnome-i18n gnome org, gtk-i18n-list gnome org
>MIME-version: 1.0
>User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) Emacs/20.7
>X-Authentication-warning: icon.labs.redhat.com: hp set sender to hp redhat com 
using -f
>
>
>Suresh Chandrasekharan <suresh chandrasekharan eng sun com> writes:
>> 	Just wonder about what are the terminal i18n efforts that's happening 
>> within the GNOME community. If someone can guide me regarding the short/long 
>> term goals in this, and who are currently working on terminal, it will be 
>> helpful. 
>> 
>
>I don't know of any effort to implement this. Of course the starting
>point (or the API you'd want to emulate, at least, I don't know how
>much reimplementation would be needed) would be the ZvtTerm widget in
>gnome-libs. XTerm's Unicode support would probably be the precedent to
>copy, and maybe has some code to use as well.
>
>Havoc