widechar support

[phil bolthole com (Philip Brown)]

Arrrg. I had written this nice long letter, and my computer crashed JUST as I
was going to send it.
Sigh. Here goes again.

I see you folks have added localization, to some degree. But gtk is still
missing one major thing right now: wide-char (16-bit) support.

I'm willing to write most of it,but I'm completely new to gtk, so I need
pointers as to WHERE to add it.

I've used 16-bit chars under Xaw and Motif, so the two methods I know of are:

Motif: Every string is "special". Widgets auto-detect whether string is
   "wide-char" or not, and do the right thing.

Xaw/Athena: text widgets have an "encoding" property, that is set to either
   8 bit or 16 bit. 

For easy coding, I would do the latter. It also would make porting my
kdrill program to gtk a lot easier.


But Aaaaanyway... here's where I figure I should NOT add it:

  gdk
  GtkStyle  (since that's a wrapper for a GC?)


The best I can come up with, is:

   gtk_text_set_charwidth(int);   (8 or 16 are only acceptible inputs)

However, that would seem to also mandate a completely separate

   gtk_button_set_charwidth(int);

and possible others. It's too bad there isn't some kind of uniform text
control other than what's in the GtkStyle stuff. But anyways. What
do you folks think?


PS: I would only code the DISPLAY part. I'm not touching 16-char input
with a 10 foot pole, since that is locale specific, and I don't need it.

PPS: here's the program I may eventually port to gtk:
http://www.bolthole.com/kdrill/