Re: Future work on GTK

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> writes:

> Preben Randhol wrote:
> >    o> Owen
> >        GTK+
> >        Currently I am working on getting the 1.2 release of GTK+
> >        finished. This will include a lot of significant changes. Recent
> >        work of mine includes rewritting the drag-and-drop code in GTK+
> >        and integrating Raster's theme code into the main branch of GTK+.
> >        For the next development cycle of GTK+, I want to work on getting
> >        really high quality internationaliation into GTK+. This will mean
> >        switching over to Unicode and supporting right-to-left languages
> >        like Arabic and Hebrew.
> 
> Regarding this last item, internationalization, will Gtk+ include a new,
> basic type that holds an international string, kinda like an XmString?
> 
> (or does that sort of thing already exist?)

yes and no. 

Currently, if the font for a widget is a fontset (i.e., created with
gtk_fontset_new() or with a "fontset = ..." declaration in a RC file),
then the string will be interpreted according to the current locale,
and drawn with appropriate fonts taken from that fontset.

That gives about 75% of the functionality of XmString, with about 1%
of the complexity.

But since locale-dependent multibyte encodings are also nasty to work
with, in my vision for the future of GTK+, every string that an
application supplies to GTK+ will be taken to be Unicode encoded as
UTF-8.  (Conversion functions from locale-dependent encodings, to
Unicode will be supplied).

GDK will then render these strings as faithfully as it can, falling
back to other fonts with additional characters when necessary. When a
unicode string would be rendered differently in different languages
(say Japanese and Chinese), it will be rendered according to the
current locale.

There will also be provisions for drawing a string according to
specific locale, so that higher-level widgets (such as the Text
widget) can support language-tagging and thus have both Japanese and
Chinese text drawn within a single set of text in such a manner as to
make everyone happy.

Regards,
                                        Owen