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Re: internationalization




On 12 May 1998, Massimo Campostrini wrote:

> Massimo Campostrini <campo@mailbox.difi.unipi.it> writes:
> 
> > An ultimate solution would be adopting Unicode (ISO-10646).  The
> > internal representation could be UTF-8, which is compatible with
> > ASCII.  Unicode support is getting widespread; we can hope that
> > Unicode software and fonts will be available on most systems Real Soon
> > Now.
> 
> I'm getting convinced that UTF-8 + ISO-10646 is the way to go.  It's
> backwards compatible with ASCII, reasonably simple, covers every
> imaginable language.  I'm lurking in a couple of mailing lists (gtk,
> mozilla.i18n) and it's the way both projects are going.  
I think the only project *not* going there yet is Emacs, because they are
lacking space for Unicode representation. But RMS has decided they should
go in that direction ASAP, so I heared.

> Stan, what do you think?  Can we decide that UTF-8 + ISO-10646 is 
> *the* xconq character set, and implement display when need arise?  I
> mean character set for strings only!  Identifiers etc. should remain
> plain ASCII.

Please remember that Unicode is an encoding of characters, not glyphs.
(You might need a lot more glyphs for oriental and arabic scripts). And
probably you should carefully think about user input. Does user ever has
to type in something that has to be translated into unicode? What Unicode
page is the keybord operating at? I have some ideas how X11 handles this,
but no clue about Mac.

> gtk code should help x11/xconq, either we (me?) port xconq to gtk or
> we snarf code from it (it's LGPL'd).  This would leave us (Ronne?)
> with the task of implementing it on mac/xconq.

If xconq is using gtk, it gets all the support from the developement of
the widget set. But the Mac port remains a problem. Have you considered
porting gtk+ to mac :) ?

> BTW, there is no need to implement *all* of ISO-10646 at once!  We
> might aim at first for MES (Minimum European Subset), which is enough
> for about every European language and it's not too big (926
> characters).  See http://www.indigo.ie/egt/standards/mes.html.  I
> heard of iso10646-mes fonts for X, which should help us a lot.
> 
> It would be nice to have a mechanism to "translate" characters
> unavailable for some reason (unimplemented, font missing...), but this
> looks like a lot of "grunt" work.

It would be very useful. When I write my language on ascii-only terminals,
that's what I do. (Have you ever tried to read french without any accents?
Sort of tricky though, but better than funny characters.) 

Jona



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