Re: The plugin approach to internationalization - request for contact person

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Omer Zak <omerz@actcom.co.il> writes:

> I am sending this message to the mailing list after having failed to find
> an appropriate E-mail address in the http://www.labs.redhat.com/ Web site. 
> My apologies to those who are not interested in the subject. 

The official page for GTK+ is at www.gtk.org. Although some of
us here at the labs do a fair bit of work on GTK+, we
are only part of the project.

There are two mailing lists relevant here:

 gtk-devel-list@redhat.com

is a general list for discussion of the development of GTK+.

 gtk-i18n-list@redhat.com

is more narrowly focused on internationalization issues. 
(See http://www.gtk.org/mailinglists.html)

> I would like to be in contact with someone from the GTK+ development group
> concerning integration of my proposed plugin mechanism into text widgets
> in the GTK+ toolkit. 
> 
> My proposal addresses the problem of text layout of non-Latin characters
> in languages with complex layout rules, such as Hebrew, Korean or Thai. 
> 
> The interface is not finalized, and I need inputs from someone, who is
> working on the GTK+ text widgets' implementation, in order to develop the
> best interface.

This area of GTK+ is being extensively revised for the next
version of GTK+. we are switching over to Unicode for
all internal operations and completely replacing the Text
widget in GTK+. This is still in the early stages of design.

I suspect we probably will be using some sort plug-in architecture
for rendering, and once I get a bit of time, I'll certainly
be interested in taking a look at your stuff. 

Raph Levien has been working a fair bit on Text display issues in the
context of the gnome-print/gnome-text module. It will probably also
use a plugin architecture for international layout. That work is 
more oriented towards high-quality output. (It deals with things like
ligatures, sophisticated hyphenation algorithms and kerning). But
I'm hoping that it's possible to share the layout backends between
that and GTK+.

(Of course, a Text or Entry widget is not simply a matter
 of display; one also needs to worry about selection and
 cursor positioning)
 
> Details about my proposal, along with a sample implementation (which is
> NOT suitable for WYSIWIG type text widgets)  can be found in the URL: 
> 
>          http://www.weizmann.ac.il/~xlacha1/plugins.html

Regards,
                                        Owen