Re: Character translation in GtkText

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Michael Vance <briareos@lokigames.com> writes:

> Hello,
> 
> I need to display international characters such as diaresis (umlaut) u in a
> GtkText widget. However, GtkText seems to translate these characters as a
> function of internationalization. I'm wondering how to turn off this
> internationalization so that these characters are displayed properly.
> 
> Any help is appreciated.

If I understand correctly, what you are referring to is that
strings are typically interpreted in GTK+ according to
locale. So, if you have some high ascii characters, they
might be interpreted as latin-1, but (depending on the
user's locale) could also be intepreted as Japanese or
latin-2.

This interpretation of high ascii characters according to
the locale only happens if the font being used is a
_fontset_ instead of a simple font.  (A fontset is a list of
fonts for different encodings) Simple 8-bit fontsjust
indexed directly by the 8-bit values in the string.

So, to get the effect you want, you have to make sure that
the font you are using in the Text widget is just a
font, not a fontset.

The easy way to do this is to load up the font you want
by hand:

 font = gdk_font_load ("-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1");

And then specify this font explicitely when inserting
into the Text widget.

 gtk_text_insert (GTK_TEXT (widget), font, NULL, NULL, string, length);

Regards,
                                        Owen

P.S. - for some background on fontsets, locales, etc, you
        can see: 

  http://developer.gnome.org/doc/whitepapers/gtki18n/index.html